John R. Fultz's Blog, page 48

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 9

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YICORI

In case you missed a chapter: Chapter1  Chapter2  Chapter3  Chapter4  Chapter5  Chapter6  Chapter7  Chapter8  

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Chapter 9. 

A Midsummer’s Night

It was the LoreKeepers who saved the day. While the battle raged along the wall, they climbed the sentry stairs two at a time hauling barrels of black oil. Harmona’s staff incinerated three more Yicori while the LoreMasters poured the barrels over the side of the battlements. Another LoreKeeper ran along the battlements setting a torch to the spilled oil. The outer surface of north wall erupted into blue-white flames. The swarm of climbing Yicori wailed, burned, and fell to earth.

The last Yicori to top the wall died in a blast of Harmona’s flame with six spears and fifteen arrows protruding from its body. Spearmen drove the flaming brute backwards until it fell screaming from the wall. The LoreKeepers’ oil burned for several minutes, charring the entire north side of the outer wall. A hundred meters below, the burnt and broken corpses of Yicori lay in heaps. The survivors had already fled into the forest.

When the oil-flames died away the dead were counted and carried away. Duval went with Harmona to thank the LoreKeepers. They took her into the catacombs below the keep where the earth had split open three days earlier, creating a new well that bubbled forth black oil.

“A gift from the StoneFathers,” explained LoreKeeper Trenton. He was chosen to oversee the extraction and barreling of the flammable substance.

“Another weapon in our fight against the flesh-eaters,” Duval said. “A perfect way to protect our walls.”

“Until it runs out,” Harmona said.

“The black well is deep, HearthMother,” Trenton said. “We’ve filled thirty barrels so far, plus the six we used to repel today’s attack. I’d say we’ll run out of barrels before we run out of oil.”

Harmona offered him a weak smile. “Good work,” she said. “Make sure we have a supply of oil at each watchtower and set up stations at the mid-point of each wall. The Yicori will climb our walls again, it’s only a matter of time. We must be ready.”

“I will see to it myself,” Trenton said.

Harmona and Duval walked to the dining hall for a mug of hot tea.

“You fought well,” she said.

“The blade was unsteady in my hands,” Duval said. “My training has only begun. The new metal is…effective. I’ll say that much.”

“You are among the first company of blade-wielders,” she said. “And you’ve set a great example. I heard men talking along the wall. You’re a hero to them. You killed a Yicori, and now they all know how effective these blades can be.”

Duval sighed and sipped his tea. “This was only a small pack of Yicori,” he said. “A scouting party. Most likely they are the first of the beasts to find HearthHome. We killed a few but most of them survived. They’ll carry the news back to the rest of their tribe. They will all come for us, Harmona. We have a few days, perhaps weeks, depending on how far out the main horde still is.”

“Then we’ve more time to prepare,” she said. “Every man or woman who’s willing to fight gets a blade and shield. Soon we’ll have armor.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Duval said. “I know it’s difficult. You haven’t had time to grieve for Dorian. None of us have. But you need to know that you’re a symbol of hope for everybody here. Now more than ever.”

Harmona let the liquid warm her belly. A quiet moment passed between them.

“As long as the StoneFathers keep bringing us the secrets of the earth and showing us how to use them,” she said. “We have a fighting chance.” She didn’t want to tell him the StoneFathers knew all along that war was inevitable. She hadn’t told anyone the truth yet, that they were dropped into a paradise doomed to become a battleground.

Duval squeezed her shoulder as he rose from the table. “Time to supervise the day’s training. Care to observe?”

“I have a council in thirty minutes.” She took his hand lightly. “Come and eat with us tonight. The girls feel safe when you’re around.”

Duval hesitated, then nodded. He left her alone with her tea and her thoughts.

Harmona met her advisors in the Great Hall, where she sat at the head of the long table. She listened, nodded, and approved. The foundries and forges were working night and day, relieving Artisans in shifts to avoid exhaustion. The weaponsmiths had taken several apprentices each, which increased productivity. Field workers, prohibited from their fields outside the wall, concentrated on seeding and maintaining the inner gardens and harvesting the orchards. The kitchens worked to preserve foods and stock the cellars for a siege.

If the New Organics could keep the Yicori from climbing their walls, they could stay safely locked in HearthHome for about a year–until provisions ran out. At least the wells inside the wall were deep and dependable, and now there was the black well. The StoneFathers could obviously open more wells anytime they needed to. Water wouldn’t be the problem in a siege.

The council examined calculations and inventories, reporting rapid progress. In a matter of days HearthHome had bent the whole of its efforts to preparing for war. It was frightening how quickly and easily the transition had overtaken her people. Tensions were running high, and fights among the young men were breaking out every day. The children of HearthHome totaled 90 under the age of ten and 120 pre-teens, all of them too young to fight. Sixty percent of New Organic women were currently pregnant, meaning another 150 non-combatants.

Duval, Macre, Andolir, and Fedgemont, four of the most respected HuntMasters, were assigned the title of “captains” for the duration of the war. Fedgemont represented the captains in council, presenting grim numbers: The Yicori had claimed 56 lives so far. In the blended ranks of Hunters and Hunters-in-Training–all of whom were now learning to be soldiers–there were 457 men and women. Ages among these troops ranged from 14 to 27, and because of the high pregnancy rate the ranks were predominately male by a factor of two-to-one.

Four-hundred-and-fifty-seven souls against a horde of Yicori. How many were out there? The StoneFathers had told her this was the last tribe of Yicori, but still there could be ten thousand of them out there lumbering toward HearthHome. Or a hundred thousand. “I will speak to them again,” she promised, “now that they have finished melding with our LoreKeepers and Artisans. Perhaps they can tell us more clearly how many Yicori are coming.”

Harmona waited for a single one of them, man or woman, to question the path in which the StoneFathers were leading them. She waited for the slightest show of suspicion about this rapid fostering of a warrior culture and the terrors that lay ahead of them. None of these advisors had seen the blood and bowels spilled along the parapet, or smelled the burning reek of Yicori flesh. None of them had seen a glimpse the violence that was to come. Only those along the north wall, and those who survived attacks in the wild, only they knew the true horror of what HearthHome was to face. The blood and guts and death that the StoneFathers had bequeathed to their chosen people.

She waited, but nobody said it. Not a single “Are we sure?” or “Is there no other way?” The StoneFathers had said it must be war, and so it must be. She wanted to tell the council the truth in that moment, to shatter their illusions of the thirty-nine benevolent faces. They knew it was coming. They set us here and waited for those creatures to come for us. They trapped us, made us believe we have no choice. And now we don’t.

Nobody questioned her or the StoneFathers, and she said nothing.

The StoneFathers and their guidance was all these people had. As their leader she needed to protect them from the pain of truth. If she told them, they would still have to fight the Yicori. Yet they would do it with less than perfect faith in their spiritual allies.

She dismissed the council and went to spend time with her girls in the blue garden. She hugged each one of them in turn and kissed their cheeks, while the citadel belched flame and smoke and prepared for war. First would come the siege, and they would see how great the Yicori horde was. The cogs of the HearthHome war machine ground themselves together with a sound like distant thunder.

####

Three days later the Leaflings decided to perform their play, even though there would be no festival this year. Harmona had encouraged Brix to proceed, and he had stripped the cast down to a skeleton crew. After working so hard for so many days, the New Organics needed a diversion. Chancey had been trying to convince Brix of this fact all along, and with Harmona’s help he finally succeeded.

A weary crowd gathered in the amphitheater at the appointed hour. All six moons lay across the evening sky like a string of pearls. For the first time in two weeks the practice yards fell silent, the clanging blades sheathed and soldiers shuffling between the benches with their families. The children ate green olives with fruit juices while adults drank wine or ale. Harmona’s seat was positioned for an excellent view. She piled onto a divan with Elodie, Astrid, and Sabine while the lamps of early evening flared about the proscenium arch. Duval stood at the edge of the HearthMother’s covered pavilion, refusing Harmona’s invitation to sit on the divan with her family. It wasn’t only her daughters who took comfort in the man’s presence.

The crowd fell quiet when the curtains parted, and the Palace of Theseus stood revealed in all its painted glory. The play had always been one of Harmona’s favorites. She had played the role of love-struck Hermia when she was an apprentice. Dorian had played Lysander. She forgot about the tremendous weight of rulership as the Athenian lovers lost themselves in the enchanted wood.

The Woodking and his wicked servant Robin Goodfellow played with the lives of mortals who had invaded their wild paradise, but the Woodking was only playing a game to win back the love of his scorned Queen. Harmona watched her girls smile for the first time since their father’s death. The amphitheater roared with laughter when Quince and Bottom performed their inept play-within-a-play for the Duke of Athens.

Despite his reduced resources, Brix’s production was flawless. The New Organics enjoyed themselves in the way they used to do. For almost two hours they forgot about the war they must fight and the tree-climbing brutes that wanted to devour them. It was a marvelous time, and Harmona could not have asked for a better way to raise their spirits.

Yet the bittersweet reunion of Woodking and Woodqueen that should have ended the play never happened. Instead a group of youths with swords hidden beneath their cloaks stormed onto the stage from both sides. Drawing their bright new blades, they held them to the necks of the players, grabbing and twisting elbows backward. Seventeen youths in all, some of them girls, now owned the stage, and the play came to a sudden halt. Before anyone realized it wasn’t part of the show, nine actors were hostages. Chancey, who played the Woodking, was one of them. Brix stared in horror from stage left, unsure if he should move, cry out, or fight.

“Organics!” One of the youths pulled back his hood to reveal a headfull of black hair and a pair of angry eyes. “We are The Stolen. The Sons and Daughters of noble houses! Hear us now, or we will end the lives of these players right before your eyes. Stay in your seats! The first one to move against us kills the Woodking.”

Harmona recognized him immediately. Anton Lecuyer had tried to convince her to send him “home” two weeks ago. He had cut his own flesh to remind her of its inherent weakness. A true son of the Urbille, perhaps he was taken too late into the bosom of Gaeya. The boy had said there were more like him, a group who wanted to abandon Gaeya and return to the Urbille. Lecuyer was too stupid to know that he would never be allowed back into the city of the Potentates. He was stupid enough to try a stunt like this.

Anton raised the point of his blade to Chancey’s chin, and Brix yelled “Stop!”

The audience froze, some already out of their seats, staring in dumb amazement.

“We have been saying for years that this place is not our home,” Anton announced. “You refused to listen. We were stolen away–lured away–from our true home by the Surgeon and the StoneFathers. Now do you see what they have given us? A new home? No! A death sentence! These monsters are coming to devour us, and we sit here waiting for them. Anyone who wants to stay and fight a losing war, you have that right. But we have a right to go home. We who were stolen from the Urbille want to go back. Now is the time! Before these beasts carry our bones in their bellies…”

Anton’s eyes turned to the HearthMother’s pavilion, where they fell upon Harmona. The girls sat breathless, clutching at their mother’s robe. Duval had drawn his sword, but he couldn’t reach the stage if he tried. Nobody had brought a bow to the amphitheater, or someone might have tried shooting an arrow. Harmona wondered if she could placate this young group of idiots, turn them loose on the Thoroughfare and be rid of them. If she did that her army would shrink by seventeen more soldiers. It might be worth it to end this internal conflict.

“HearthMother!” Anton yelled at her. “It’s up to you. Come and lead us to the Hidden Gate. Open the way for us. Nobody has to die. Any of you who wish to join us are welcome.”

The crowd remained silent as Harmona made her way down the aisle. Duval held back the girls, who would have run after her. Elodie wept with her head against his thigh. This was something Harmona had to do alone, something she’d explain to the girls later.

She reached floor of the amphitheater and climbed the short stairs to stand on the stage. Anton gestured with his blade, and she lay the black staff at his feet. The green flame extinguished itself, as it always did when she wasn’t touching it. She thought Anton would take up the weapon and carry it back to the Urbille, but he only kicked it away.

“Lead us to the gate, open the way, and we’ll release our hostages,” he said.

Harmona nodded. She walked past Brix, who squeezed her hand for a moment and slipped a prop dagger into a pocket of her robe. Anton moved the point of his sword to her neck. The seventeen Stolen followed her out of the amphitheater, dragging along their nine hostages. They moved carefully behind Harmona and Anton along the garden path.

“You should have listened,” Anton said. “You could have avoided these drastic consequences.”

“Do you see anybody joining your little revolution?” she asked, looking backward. “These people want to stay and fight for their real home. Do you really think there’s a place for you in the Urbille now that you’ve been gone so long? Do you imagine House Lecuyer remembers you and longs for your return? They’ve already replaced you with another stolen infant. Count on it.”

“Shut up,” Anton said. They walked between rows of sculpted evergreens. “Our parents will accept us because we are their children.”

“They were never your true parents,” Harmona said.

Anton lowered his blade and slapped her across the face. Harmona gritted her teeth and clutched the dagger inside her pocket.

“Say another word and I’ll cut your tongue out before I leave,” Anton said. Harmona wiped blood from her lip and led them into the Courtyard of the Hidden Gate. The great arch of stone that formed the porte stood five meters high, carved with symbols and formulae that Harmona could not read. She knew its Word of Command only because it had been given to her by the gate’s creator.

She smiled to see that same creator standing in front of the gate, as if waiting for her. He wore a black tri-corner hat as usual. His face was a finely-carved mask of bronze with black opticals. His cloak hung dark as night from inhumanly broad shoulders, and his fists rested on the pommel of a greatsword whose point rested between his boots. On a stone bench beside him lay an infant swaddled in white cloth.

“Wail…” Harmona greeted him with a mixture of relief and anger. Better late than never. He must have arrived seconds ago from the other side of the gate. Coincidence or intervention from the StoneFathers? Wail was their roaming disciple. She was no longer sure if she could trust him, but she was glad to see him anyway.

“What have we here?” Wail said. “A mutiny?” His voice rang like a bell from the walls of the cloistered garden.

Anton’s people froze, securing their hostages. Anton pointed his blade at Wail. “You brought us here against our will, Surgeon. Now we’re going home. Open the gate or stand aside so Harmona can do it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that,” said Wail. “Let these people go and I’ll explain to you why.”

“No!” said Anton. He grabbed Harmona by the hair and forced her head back, raising his blade to her neck. “Open the gate or she dies.”

Anton’s eyes were on Wail, who stood calm as a statue. Harmona pulled the dagger from her robe and plunged it into Anton’s thigh. The boy screamed and looked to the weapon protruding from his leg. She slammed the side of his head with her doubled fists and he fell, the sword clattering from his hand.

Clouds of purple mist exploded from the rows of giant orchids, and the Surgeon’s dark blade flashed here and there about the garden. Someone screamed as Harmona dove for Anton’s sword. She raised her eyes to see the Surgeon dancing between the ranks of rebels and hostages, his long blade flickering like a pale flame. Removing an ear or finger, jabbing an eyeball without puncturing the brain behind it. He parried a sword blow, then another and another, returning the attacks with disabling thrusts and disabling lacerations. When half their number was down in seconds, bleeding and howling, the rest threw down their swords and ran.

The purple mist made Harmona drowsy. It must be why everyone moved so slowly while the Surgeon moved so quickly. Wail had called forth the vapors as surely as he had called dead spirits from the swamp ten years ago. Anton pushed through his bleeding companions and scuttled over the wall of the garden. He dropped and ran, leaving a trail of red drops from his wounded leg.

Two of the Stolen lay bleeding to death from sliced jugulars, six of them clutched punctured eyes, hands, or faces, and nine of them had fled. Beyond the rows of orchids, guards ran them down one by one, shackling their hands and leading them away at Duval’s command. Seventeen souls who might have made good soldiers. Maybe some of them could be redeemed, but most would never be trusted again.

There was no sign of Anton. He had slipped away by using his fellow conspirators as a diversion. But he wouldn’t get far with a wounded leg. The only possible place to hide was in the catacombs beneath the citadel. She’d have to send someone to hunt him down there. At least his absurd conspiracy was ended for now. This was no time for Harmona’s people to be divided.

Guards came for the wounded and led them away. They wept and moaned and blamed Anton for the whole thing. Harmona stayed in the bloody garden as the last of them were hauled away. Wail presented the new baby to Harmona, laying it in her arms like a priceless treasure. The little fellow couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old. The newest member of HearthHome, and another one who couldn’t fight this war.

“You have a fine sense of timing,” Harmona said, her eyes on the baby. She stroked its head, held it close to her. It cooed and made funny little shapes with its mouth. She missed the days when her girls were this tiny.

“You’re welcome,” said Wail. “I took him from a Harvester along the Lesser Thoroughfare.”

“Did you know?” She brought her face close to his bronze mask. The anger poured from her like an invisible steam. She could almost hear the gears and cogs turning in his mechanized body.

Wail’s head tilted. His expressionless face did not change. It never did. Beatifics could only change their expression when they changed faces.

“Tell me: Did you know?” she asked again.

“Did I know what?”

“That this isn’t our world after all? That a horde of monsters is coming to devour us? That it’s all part of some insane plan hatched by the StoneFathers? Tell me you didn’t know. I’ll try to believe you.”

Wail wiped his bloody sword on the edge of his cloak. The last of the purple mist faded at his feet. “Slow down. Tell me everything.”

Harmona carried the new arrival toward the nursery. There it would be bathed, fed, and eventually assigned to a family who wished to raise it. Wail walked beside her, and she noticed Duval following them at a distance. She gave him a brief look that said “I’m fine” and explained to Wail what was happening.

“I told you on the day we met,” said Wail. “That I was building an army here. That one day I would lead it back to the Urbille and bring down the Potentates. But that day is hundreds of years away. There aren’t enough of you here to make any kind of viable fighting force. The army I agreed to build for the Ministere de Stone will be an army of your people’s descendants. A century or two from now there will be thousands and thousands of New Organics. Those who want to fight the Potentates will have the chance to do so. I thought you understood that.”

“I did,” Harmona said. “But apparently the StoneFathers had other ideas.”

“They told me this world was uninhabited,” Wail said.

“They lied,” Harmona said. “To all of us.”

“Why would they do that?” Wail said.

“Isn’t it obvious? They’re remaking us. Turning us into a society of warriors they can use to bring down the Potentates, but only if we prove ourselves deadly enough to take this world. And if not, we get wiped out. They can always start again with a new batch of Organics.”

Wail stood in silence for awhile. Duval leaned against a nearby pillar, still watching. Brix and Chancey came from the amphitheater to return Harmona’s staff. She wrapped her fist around the black metal, and the green flame ignited at its head. Brix and Chancey embraced her, gave her apologies and thanks. They greeted Wail with handshakes and hugs.

“The play was superb,” Harmona said, “despite the interrupted Third Act.”

Brix rolled his eyes and sighed. Harmona lay a hand on Chancey’s shoulder. He had removed the Woodking costume and looked like a normal frightened man again.

“You were very brave,” Harmona told him.

“What choice did I have?” Chancey asked. Brix wrapped an arm about him.

Harmona laughed. “What choice do any of us have?”

“Excuse me,” said Wail. He turned with a swirl of black fabric and walked away.

“Where are you going?”

“To speak with the StoneFathers,” Wail said. “Alone.”

####

She looked for Wail later that night, but he was already gone. Slipped back through the Hidden Gate without a parting word. That was always the way with Wail. He came and went like a restless ghost, delivering his recently liberated charges. She had grown used to this behavior over the past decade.

She wondered what he said to the StoneFathers, and what they told him.

Most of all she wondered if it would make any difference whatsoever.

 

NEXT: “Creep City”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

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—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz  —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 8

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THE RUDE MECHANICALS

Chapter 8.

Skiptrain

Crag began his day in the usual way: Inserting his heart-key into the slot at the center of his chest and winding it clockwise ninety-nine times. As early sunbeams poked through the window of his garret, Beatifics all across the city were doing the exact same thing. The unspoken ritual of sunrise in the Urbille.

Clatterpox didn’t need keys to keep their heart-furnaces burning. They simply dropped in the next chunk of coal when the old one started burning low. They spent their lives working in the foundries and factories of the Rusted Zone to keep their coal rations coming.

The coal itself came from distant mines manned by more Clatterpox, who worked to the dictates of Beatific supervisors. Knowing those mines existed reminded Crag that there were plenty of jobs worse than his. Although today he didn’t need the reminder.

Today was the first step in getting Caroline out. The first step to getting her back.

He watched the smokes of the Urbille rise from its jagged skyline. The streets were full of Clatterpox on their way to morning shifts and the pubs were full of night-workers ready to blow off some literal steam. A few Beatific carriages crawled slowly through the lanes drawn by clockwork horses. The sky was a bruised melange of purple and orange.

The cabinet above his head was lined with red velvet, a collection of faces hanging inside. Four of the masks were Crag’s faces, the other six belonged to Caroline. He’d kept her faces in perfect shape. He looked at them every morning before going to work. They never made him feel any less alone. Today was different though. Caroline’s faces smiled at him with porcelain lips and empty optical sockets. They made silent promises to him.

She’ll wear us again soon. Once you’ve done your job.

Crag’s choices were bronze, silver, or a pair of porcelain visages crafted in the prevailing style of twenty years ago. He wore the bronze face when he expected trouble or needed to lean on a contact. The silver face was an award from the department for 150 years of dedicated service. He’d never worn it. Lots of people to interview today, so a porcelain face was the obvious choice. Most Beatifics wore porcelain every day, swapping them for more exotic masks whenever they wanted to impress, protest, or express a specific emotion.

A porcelain face was the least threatening, the most sociable, the least objectionable. Crag could ask questions and get answers with a porcelain face. The bronze reminded everybody that he was with the Ministere de Justice. An enforcer of the existing power structure, a tool of the Potentates.

He picked up a porcelain face and slid it carefully over his naked silver skull, watching himself in an oval mirror. It snapped into place and he wiped the dust from its cheeks with a kerchief. His amber opticals stared back at him from the glass. The face bore a painted goatee and curling mustache. Caroline called it his “handsome face,” as opposed to the second porcelain mask, which she referred to as his “thinking face.”

He checked his side-arm, securing it in the shoulder holster, and chose a grey overcoat. Grey was good for moving unnoticed through the crowds of colorfully-dressed Beatifics. The black top hat completed his illusion of a perfectly normal Beatific, and he hit the streets, hailing a private coach driven by a wheezing Clatterpox.

First stop, the Minstere de Science, to see what Dr. Aimon Wail’s former colleagues had to say about his breakdown of twelve years ago. The institute stood at the inner edge of the Rusted Zone like a larger version of the Ministere de Justice: a towering parabola of glass and steel grown from a foundation of ancient granite. Inside was a maze of antiseptic corridors hung with pastel art prints and displays of antique medical relics from the Organic Age. The Tribune’s people had notified the Ministere de Science that Crag would be paying them a visit, so they made him welcome. The place either had nothing to hide, or they were very good at hiding it.

He went directly to the new Supervisor, a man named Pairey. The only thing Pairey could tell Crag was that he replaced Supervisor Guillaume a week after Dr. Wail had murdered him. Pairey hadn’t witnessed the attack or the breakdown, having been stationed on another level of the Ministere when Wail lost it. A useless lead. Crag took the personnel files Pairey offered him and moved on to the Surgeons who had worked with Wail.

Twenty-eight Surgeons staffed the Ministere, some of them on rotating assignments, but fourteen had worked Conversions during the same thirty-year period as Wail. Of those fourteen, twelve Surgeons were still here, while the other two were unavailable on “special projects.” Even Crag’s clout as an Inspector wouldn’t get him anywhere near those two. He questioned the twelve resident Surgeons and began to build a picture of what happened to Dr. Wail:

Wail had filed a Special Permit for Early Conversion on behalf of his son Alain. The boy’s original Conversion date was only a few hours away, so filing such a permit seemed insane on its surface. The permit was signed by Supervisor Guillaume and included in the files Pairey provided. A read of the document revealed in Wail’s spidery script that Alain had acquired a necrotic disease on his trip home from a Beatific prep school. He was turning sixteen and, like most kids raised by Beatifics, he looked forward to Conversion on his birthday. Wail arrived with Alain some eleven hours before the Conversion was scheduled, filing his Special Permit without waiting for it to be signed or approved.

A few Surgeons saw the boy before he entered the Conversion Room. Apparently, his body had experienced a sort of rapid decay unprecedented in medical science. Alain was half-dead when they laid him on the operating table. Wails’ stated goal–his only hope–was to perform Conversion before the disease reached his son’s brain. Only the brain was necessary for Conversion, as the center of neural activity and psychological identity. Alain’s brain, like that of any Beatific, would be transplanted into a silver skull attached to a new Beatific body. The miracle of the process was the preservation of the living brain indefinitely while the rest of the Organic body was discarded. This was how the Urbille distributed immortality.

Wail, insisting on performing the operation himself, began the process of removing his son’s brain from its bony casement. The procedure was monitored by two resident Surgeons. Both of them told Crag the surgery initially went off without a hitch, but Wail was too late. The black death that consumed Alain’s flesh had already reached his brain. There was nothing left of the organ but a shriveled lump of dead tissue, dark as a clot of soft coal.

Realizing his son was gone, Wail lost his mind. Attendants dragged him from the Conversion Room in a violent fit of screaming. Alain’s remains were incinerated to avoid the spread of contagion among the city’s Organic youth. Wail got a leave of absence, but he didn’t take it easy. He started digging around, looking into Supervisor Guillaume and the “special projects” division of the Ministere de Science. Did he suspect they had something to do with Alain’s death?

That evening, according to official reports, Wail confronted Guillaume at his residence in the Good Hills and stabbed him through the optical with a scalpel. Guillaume’s brain was punctured by the weapon, and Wail fled into the night. Gendarmes sent to the Wail residence discovered the manor-house in flames and the charred remains of his wife Kalmea.

Crag read that last part again. Something didn’t make sense. The man went mad over losing his son. Why kill his wife? Was she involved in Alain’s death? An affair with Guillaume, maybe? One of the Surgeons implied as much, but others denied it. Apparently Wail loved his wife and was a perfect husband. Crag wondered if it was really Wail who burned down his own house and killed Kalmea. If the gendarmes had done it in retaliation for Guillaume’s death, would their captains admit it? Write it into their reports? Crag knew better.

The question wasn’t “Why did Wail go mad?” It was “Why did Wail become a highwayman?” And where did he go when he left the Urbille? Was he on some kind of crusade? He stole Organic youths and babies from the Urbille or on their way to it. Why? Was he trying to save them from the Potentates, or was he killing them himself? Liberating them from this wretched life like the child-killer? The killer had taken his victims alive too. The bastard liked to watch them suffer. How deep did Wail’s madness go, and what was he doing with all these young Organics? Crag wouldn’t find these answers at the Ministere de Science.

A Beatific family came through the main doors as he was leaving, mother and father with smiling porcelain faces trying to soothe their nervous daughter. She was a pale, frightened thing in a peaches-and-cream dress with lacy ruffles. They guided her toward the Conversion Department and the girl wept tears of apprehensive joy.

“It’ll be over before you know it,” the mother told her daughter.

“At last you’ll be a true Beatific,” said the father.

Crag tipped his hat as he passed. He recalled the day of his own Conversion two centuries ago ago. A thrilling mix of fear and excitement. Kind of like falling in love.

Outside the wind picked up and rustled the hem of his longcoat. Electricity danced between the street lamps in pale blue sparks. A rabidity was on its way. Crag stood back from the road, leaning against one of the two great pillars framing the door of the Ministere de Science. Loose trash and paper debris began flying along the street, and the shuffling crowds of Clatterpox paused. The ones who drove coaches for sheltered Beatifics called their mechanical steeds to a halt. The rabidity rose among them like an invisible storm, the air pressure making Crag’s gaskets squeak and gears grind.

A fissure opened above the square and a torrent of lightnings fell through, dispersinging a dozen directions. The bolts crackled and bounced off the walls and streets. Some of them converged and ripped holes in the fabric of space-time. The landscapes of other worlds, parallel dimensions, gleamed bright as day or dark as midnight on the other sides of the fissures. These vacuities hung in mid-air, shimmering and seething with a strange gravity, pulling at anyone nearby, drawing them into itself. Alien worlds seeking to gobble up the fine citizens of the Urbille. The rabidities were common weather events here, and the city had learned to live with them.

The Clatterpox were lucky: The weight of their iron bodies gave them a hold on the ground below their slab-like feet. Some of them sat on the ground to ensure they didn’t tip over and stumble into a vacuity on their own. Beatific pedestrians had to be more careful. They held onto lamp poles, brick facades, leaned against the sides of buildings, or locked arms in hunched crowds. Inside their coaches the Beatific riders were safe; most vacuities weren’t large enough to swallow a carriage.

A pair of Clatterpox held a small child by his hands while the gravity of a nearby vacuity pulled his tiny feet into the air. The child laughed as his parents hissed and fumed and kept the boy from falling into another world. Crag peered through the singularity and saw a molten sea flowing beneath a range of volcanoes. Giants lumbered across the steaming landscape, marching to war or perhaps hunting some primal fire-beast. Another vacuity revealed a green forest with trees like white towers, villages of singing fungi spread about their roots.

Crag took a perverse pleasure in staring through vacuities. The random fissures never opened to worlds along the Nexus. These worlds weren’t Affinities, they were wild dimensions that you couldn’t even reach by taking the Thoroughfares. If you fell through one of these breaches, you were stuck in that off-grid world forever. Vacuties never opened to the same world twice.

Crag once read a book theorizing that rabidities were a symptom of the Nexus itself decaying, unaligned worlds seeping through cracks between the conglomerated Affinities. The space/time fissures usually manifested from young and savage worlds rocked by chaos. Or so the prevailing theory had it. Six years ago Crag had seen a Beatific commit suicide by diving head-first into a vacuity. There was no predicting or preventing them.

Now the vacuities snapped shut, all of them at once. The wind died down along with the gravity. The street resumed its normal pace of travel, chatter, and commerce. Crag adjusted his top hat and hailed a carriage.

The Good Hills always made him miss the downtown precincts. It was too quiet among the expansive lawns of crushed glass and the carefully pruned rows of ancient trees. The mansions of Beatific families were built of stone, smothered in ivy, decorated with the work of sculptors, artisans, and landscape architects. Cast-iron fences marked the territory of each family, and the avenues between were lit by gas lamps molded into fantastic shapes. One such lamp sat on every corner and was lit every evening by Clatterpox servants.

The Palace of the Potentates rose from a hilltop at the center of the Good Hills, a massive shadow against the sky. A dark woodland surrounded the citadel of ancient stone, separating it entirely from the estates of the Beatifics. The citadel was large enough to contain a second city within itself, and according to rumors it did. Only two kinds of people ever saw what went on behind those monolithic walls: those who served the Potentates at the highest levels, and those condemned to the labyrinth beneath the palace. Somewhere beneath that geometrical mountain of mossy stone, Caroline lay in a dank cell waiting to see the sunlight again. Crag forced himself not to think about her. Not when he was so close to getting her out. It would only ruin his concentration.

The estate houses were impressive, architectural works of art handed down for centuries, some for millennia. One could earn his way into the Good Hills through service to the Potentates. If Caroline hadn’t been sent inside, Crag might have earned her one of these houses by now. It would be the first thing he asked for when they gave her back to him. A reward long overdue. They knew he wouldn’t accept an estate while Caroline was incarcerated, even though he deserved it. So they didn’t bother to offer, and Crag waited. In his line of work it paid to be patient.

We’ll live in one of these houses soon.

Then we’ll be ready to start a family.

Crag stopped the carriage at the ruins of the Wail estate. Not much to see here: a burnt-out structure, caved-in wine cellar, several acres of land marked with dried-up marble fountains. Dozens of trees grown wild from lack of pruning. Weeds and moss crawled up from the tree roots, bursting unhurriedly through the layers of crushed glass. Crag kicked a few stones around. The mansions of seven other estates were visible from the Wail grounds, obscured somewhat by rolling hills and leafy trees.

The Tribune had provided a list of families who were recent victims of the highwayman. There were forty-four houses on the list, and half of them had been hit more than once. Merchants liked to travel crossworld in trains of comfortable coaches, and they often brought their families along to learn the trade. Even now, when the threat of the highwayman was a well-established fact, merchant lords still insisted on following tradition. Every merchant son was supposed to take over the family business someday. Most of them eventually did, decades after Conversion, when their fathers decided to retire. Others, like Crag, fell out with their families and found another way to make a living. Beatifics in general didn’t take kindly to children who pursued individuality.

Crag’s parents had been severely disappointed when he decided to work for the Ministere de Justice. They had moved across the Nexus to an estate in Neopolis, leaving him nothing here but Caroline. Crag didn’t hold a grudge, since she was all he’d ever wanted anyway. Crag’s father told him that one day he would regret his decision to work for the Potentates. That day had come right after Caroline was jailed. But Crag had kept on working anyway. There was nothing to do but work and wait. It always came back to patience.

Crag started the Beatific interviews at House Corvais, then moved on to House Pierre, House Quatrain, House Lecuyer, and finally House Beauvais. By midday he’d patched together a story that varied hardly at all from merchant to merchant:

The highwayman accosts a caravan on the open Thoroughfare, on its way from the Urbille or back to it. The attacks are spread almost evenly between incoming and outgoing caravans. Often there is some sense of atmospheric upheaval to mark his coming, like the onset of a rabidity. He appears in a clatter of hooves, riding on a steed of black metal, demanding the surrender of various goods including any children in the caravan. The money and jewels are secondary to the highwayman’s true goal–the acquisition of young Organics for unknown purposes.

The Beatifics tried hiring bodyguards, but the Surgeon cuts down or shoots down anyone who tries to stop him. The stories varied in color and detail, but the common denominator was violence. The Surgeon knows Beatific bodies intimately since he used to construct them. He takes them apart in seconds with bullet or blade, displaying the skills of a master. All the tellers agreed one one aspect of his magic: He speaks to the young Organics in a voice calm and reassuring. He enspells them with dreams, lies, and magic. In every case they end up following him from the caravan voluntarily. He doesn’t drag them away like true captives. Finally, he promises a swift death to any who try to follow him, and several times he has delivered on that promise.

None of the interviewees could remember what Wail said to the children. Another reason to believe that it was some kind of supernatural effect, although it could be some kind of gas or poison that steals their will. Such a substance wouldn’t work on Beatifics, only on air-breathing Organics. Whether it was mystical or scientific, Dr. Wail had the power to make people follow him gladly.

Crag considered the implications. Was there a cause being served here? Something beyond insanity and murder? Was he abducting Organics or recruiting them? If so, recruiting them for what? Crag spoke to three more merchant lords that evening and decided there was nothing more to learn from them.

The carriage took him into the Rusted Zone, where he started canvasing a list of Clatterpox whose children were stolen from the streets of the Urbille. They told him stories of their losses, although many of them were now raising replacement children. Their stories matched the merchants’ tales of the highwayman’s activities, except that he didn’t ride a mechanical horse in the Urbille. It might have attracted too much attention. Wail simply walked out of the shadows, spoke a few words to the Clatterpox children who played in vacant lots or trash heaps, and led them down an alley to nowhere.

But he had to be taking them somewhere.

Wail could have an ally or co-conspirator inside the Urbille. That would account for his rapid disappearances and make it easier to smuggle children out of the city. Crag decided it wasn’t just a possibility, it was a certainty. Somebody in the Urbille knew what Wail had become, and this person or persons helped him commit these crimes.

Which pointed again to some kind of cause or crusade.

Out on the street again Crag dismissed the carriage and walked through clouds of red dust. Fizzleshades appeared on the nearest corner, weeping phantoms who blinked in and out of existence. The shades of men and women who had lived in the Urbille during the Organic Age thousands of years ago. Scientists dismissed them as spiritual residue brought to a semblance of life by stray psychic currents. Most people knew them as harmless ghosts, although they could be disturbing and unsettling to anyone not familiar with the Urbille.

“Please help me,” a ragged phantom cried. “A crust of bread…”

Crag ignored the ghost. It had no substance. It couldn’t eat bread if he decided to give it a whole loaf. The fizzleshades played out the tragedies of their lives over and over again. Most of the time this included the circumstances of their deaths. Obviously this one had died of starvation millennia ago. It would fade back into nothing in a matter of seconds.

Once Crag had spotted an entire family of fizzleshades weeping in the middle of the street, begging for change from passers-by. They held shape and form for three solid hours; he had stopped to watch them from concealment. They begged in weaker and weaker voices until one by one they lay still in the rust, as if going to sleep. A mother, a father, and six children, thin as skeletons and starving to death. But it was only their images–their spiritual residue–that lived on. There was no true hunger, just as there were no living beings about to die in the street. People walked around the fading specters as if skirting the edges of murky puddle.

Crag had watched until the last of them disappeared, then donated money to a charity for underfed Clatterpox children. The poor kids had it rough most of the time. If you were lucky enough to be a Beatific child, you hit the jackpot. Of all the children raised in the Urbille, imported from the Outer Affinities where they would have little chance of survival, the only ones that ever died before reaching Conversion Day were those raised by Clatterpox. There was a movement among the Beatifics to outlaw the raising of children by Clatterpox, but it never got any traction with the Potentates. Caroline had supported one of those movements, and it set her on a bad path. She knew the truth and she acted on it. Truth was always a dangerous thing in the Urbille.

Crag considered the typical life of a Clatterpox child. If I was given to these hunks of junk and told I would be one of them someday, I might follow a handsome stranger into an alley and never come back myself.

The Outland Zone was full of aliens humanoid and inhuman. Most of them were visitors from the Inner Affinities. They came to the Urbille for trade, entertainment, legal business, and to pay a yearly tribute to the Potentates. Crag headed for the Theatre d’ Ames Rire. There was one more name on his list of witnesses worth checking out.

The amphitheatre was built of ancient marble, massive blocks of it sculpted into monolithic perfection. Crowds of Beatifics entered through the main gate beneath an archway alive with flowering vines and blossoms. Clatterpox patrons entered through a side gate along with non-citizens. The evening performance was about to begin, and the vast semi-circle of spectator benches was filling up fast.

Crag noticed an unusually high number of goblins in the audience. The gnarled little gremlins had been moving to the Urbille in record numbers for about fifteen years now. The worst goblins were prone to forming street-gangs and rumbling with their Clatterpox counterparts, but the gendarmes put gangs down on a regular basis. Apparently goblinkind was doing so well in the city that they could afford tickets to see the Rude Mechanicals. But he wasn’t here to track down goblins. The majority of the seats were filled by smartly dressed Beatifics wearing exquisite porcelain faces.

The sun sank behind the tangled skyline of the Rusted Zone, and Clatterpox attendants rushed about the amphitheater lighting gaslamps. The great red curtain remained closed in front of the stage, and a live Beatific orchestra played below the footlights.

Someone asked Crag for a ticket, but he flashed his badge instead. The banner above the concession gallery read THE RUDE MECHANICALS present THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR. FINAL SHOW OF THE SEASON! Crag took a seat near the back with a direct view of the stage.

He watched the entire play. It wasn’t bad. He’d seen it before, decades ago, with Caroline at his side. Some early date of theirs, or maybe it was an early anniversary. A twinge of shame bubbled in the coils of his stomach because he couldn’t remember. He did recall that the troupe was somewhat different in those days. It had a different leader then, which was one of the reasons he came here today. Sala North, the famous founder of the Rude Mechanicals, had been killed by the Surgeon ten years ago on the Lesser Thoroughfare.

The actor who now directed the troupe also played the role of Marc Antony. The costuming and masks were excellent in their recreation of a lost Organic world. A few times during the performance Crag forgot he wasn’t actually here to enjoy it. When the tragedy was finally over, Caesar’s ghost had delivered its prophecy, the scheming Brutus lay dead by his own blade, and the entire troupe came forward to take their final bows.

The cheering crowed tossed roses, brilliants, and other tokens of appreciation onto the stage. The applause was deafening until the crowds dispersed toward the various exits. The orchestra played them out with an upbeat tune.

Crag’s badge got him back-stage access. He went to congratulate the director, who stood in a crowd of Beatific admirers, still wearing the porcelain face of Marc Antony. Crag waited for his moment as the actor/director took his compliments. He approached Marc Antony with badge extended.

“Mr. Skiptrain,” Crag said. “My name is Inspector Crag. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Skiptrain lowered his head in a show of respect. His green opticals examined Crag’s badge, something most people never bothered to do. The actor/director nodded and seemed to shrug. The rest of his players and staff rushed around the place removing scenery, adjusting curtains, stuffing props and costumes into rolling cases. A few members of the Rude Mechanicals stood off to the side watching Skiptrain talk to Crag, still wearing mock Roman armor and short swords. Their porcelain faces were inscrutable, but Crag knew they didn’t trust him. Showfolk were a strange breed, even in a strange place like the Urbille.

“What can I do for you?” Skiptrain asked. He offered a hand and Crag shook it. “An autograph for your wife, perhaps?”

“No thanks,” Crag said. “Quite a show you put on. I’ve seen it before. You do it better.”

Skiptrain nodded. “If you will allow me to remove my costume and put on a more presentable face, I’ll dine with you this evening at the AORTA. Do you know the place? It’s right down the street.”

“This won’t take that long,” Crag said. Skiptrain folded his arms, looking more like an imperious Roman than he had during the play.

“Ten years ago your predecessor, Sala North, was murdered by the highwayman known as the Surgeon.”

“You need not remind me, sir.” Skiptrain said. “It was one of the saddest days of my life.” He looked away, meeting the gaze of an actress. She slipped behind some curtains, perhaps sent on some prearranged errand by that look.

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” Crag said. “North was a legend, even to someone as clueless about the Arts as me.”

“Sala was a hero to us all,” said Skiptrain. His hands spread out to indicate the rest of his troupe.

“What do you remember about the day she died? I’d be especially interested in anything you can tell me about the Surgeon. I understand he abducted four Organic apprentices that day as well.”

Skiptrain nodded and set himself down on a packing crate. The gears in his neck sighed with a venting of pressure. “We were on the Lesser Thoroughfare,” Skiptrain said. “For two years we’d been travelling the Affinities, playing to crowds that rarely get to see us. It is our custom twice a year to tour in such a manner, although the tours are not as extensive as they used to be. With Sala as our leader, we played everything from great arenas like this one to ramshackle hovels. No crowd was too small. We even played a series of shows at a great necropolis, where the dead and undead laughed at our tragedies and wept at our comedies. Those were exciting days.”

Skiptrain paused, lost in his thoughts for a moment. Crag did not interrupt. Let people tell their story and know how to listen. It was one of his greatest skills, perhaps the only one worth anything in the Urbille.

“Sala had high hopes for our apprentices. They were the first Organics to join our group in fifty years. After a two-year apprenticeship roaming the Affinities with us, all four of them earned the right to call themselves Rude Mechanicals, which comes with the right to Beatific status. We were headed back to the Urbille for the Conversion ceremonies when he found us.”

“Excuse me,” Crag said. “Why were you on the Lesser Thoroughfare? Isn’t the Greater Thoroughfare more safe?”

“We’d heard rumors of the highwayman,” said Skiptrain. “The Terror of the Road Between the Worlds, they called him. He struck only on the Greater Thoroughfare, or so we thought. But he found us as crossing through some backwater Affinity, a haunted swamp. The dead came to us first, the spirits of those who had died in the muck. These were not fizzleshades, Inspector, they were specters of fear and pain. The Surgeon seemed to have some kind of control over them.

“First the specters waylaid us, then the highwayman rode out of the rain on his black steed. He demanded that we give him the apprentices. Sala defied him. She struck at him with her staff of green flame. I would have followed her lead, but the Surgeon made a sign and the dead spirits swarmed Sala, ripping her body apart. In seconds the only thing left of her was a pile of broken gears and coils. And her beautiful skull with its gorgeous mask. The Surgeon took the mask to wear himself. Perhaps he still wears it. After he killed Sala, the rest of us knew we had no choice.”

“Did he say anything about why he wanted the children? Where he intended to take them?”

“No,” said Skiptrain. “He only led them into the swamp, and we never saw them again. I took Sala’s role because it’s what she would have wanted. But our young apprentices were lost.”

“Into the swamp?” Crag said. “He took them away from the Thoroughfare?”

“Yes,” said Skiptrain. “This is how I remember it. You can ask any of my troupe and they’ll tell you the same thing.”

Crag was sure they would. Nobody could lie or stick to a story better than actors.

“I need you to think very hard about that day, Skiptrain,” Crag said. “Can you remember any other details that might explain why the Surgeon wanted your apprentices, or where he may have taken them?”

Skiptrain replied immediately, a sure sign that he was lying.

“I have no idea whatsoever.”

“Did you ever see the Surgeon again?”

Skiptrain shook his head and removed the Marc Antony wig, exposing the back of his silver skull. “If I had seen him, I would surely have tried to kill him. For Sala.”

“Since that time have you traveled with any more Organics?”

“No,” said Skiptrain. “Organics are too…fragile…for the rigors of stage life. And I didn’t want to be responsible for losing any more of them.”

Crag thanked the troupe leader for his time and gave him a card.

“Please contact me if you remember anything else. Anything at all.”

“Very well, Inspector. Thank you for attending our performance this evening.”

Crag started to walk away while Skiptrain stood there, hairless and watching.

“I see this was your last show here,” Crag said. “What’s next for the Rude Mechanicals?”

“We’re hitting the road,” Skiptrain said. “We have an engagement in Neopolis. A new Summer Tour will follow.”

“Interesting way to make a living,” said Crag. “When do you leave?”

“In three days,” said Skiptrain. “Which explains all of this mess and chaos you see backstage. It is a time of transition for us. The open road calls.”

“Oh, one more thing,” Crag leaned in close, lowered his voice. “I need the names of your lost apprentices for my official report.” He pulled out a small pad and a fountain pen.

“Ah, well, let’s see…” Skiptrain rubbed his porcelain chin. “There was Brix, Chancey, Dorian, and Harmona. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Inspector…”

“Of course,” Crag said. “Good luck on your travels.”

Skiptrain disappeared into the bowels of the backstage complex.

Crag wrote down the four names, along with a notation: Skiptrain — Did not ask if his apprentices might still be alive. Unwilling to theorize or even guess at the Surgeon’s motives. Showed very little interest in the case, especially for someone so affected by it.

One more notation, just below the first: What’s he hiding?

Here was the hot lead. Crag’s instinct told him Skiptrain was the key to finding Wail. He didn’t know what the connection might be, but it had something to do with the four missing apprentices. If the Surgeon were fueling some kind of cause, then Skiptrain might know all about it. He could have handed over the apprentices to the highwayman and murdered Sala North himself. One way to get ahead in the world. Yet the man seemed to genuinely miss his dead mentor. Crag hated dealing with actors. You never could be sure if they were displaying real emotions or faking it.

Either way Skiptrain would lead him to the truth. Crag would make sure of it.

Even if he had to follow the Rude Mechanicals all the way to Neopolis.

 

NEXT: “A Midsummer’s Night”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 7

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BRUNO

Chapter 7. 

A Free Road

The entire caravan consisted of Pepper Domo and an iron carriage pulled by a green-skinned tiger. Svetlana had spent the night comfortably in one of Domo’s guest rooms. She said goodbye to Gehosopha over breakfast. Domo had yet to show himself when the hyep departed. Perhaps the Apothecary had drank too much Andromedan last night and required more recovery time than the Composite Being, who could spread a hangover across several brains at once. Svetlana was eager to begin the next leg of her journey, but only Domo knew the way.

“Can I trust this Apothecary?” she asked Gehosopha as he left.

“He is a fair and honorable trader,” Gehosopha answered. “This cluster will miss your company, Svetlana.”

She had no idea how to approach embracing the cluster of heads that was Gehosopha’s middle body, so she simply nodded and offered him an awkward bow.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We will hire a replacement sentinel before leaving Nil,” said the Composite Being. “I hope you find your missing offspring.”

Svetlana wanted to weep, but she took a deep breath and saved it for later. She waved as the Composite Beings lumbered down the street, the tops of their central stems loaded with crates full of fresh serums. The bizarre crowd soon swallowed them up.

Domo’s carriage came rolling from the stable behind his shop. The body and four wheels were made of black iron, the roof lined with a short fence for securing luggage and trade goods. A silver trim formed arabesques across the single entry door. A curtained window on the opposite side of the coach showed drapes of red velvet. The barrels and trunks containing Domo’s serums had been loaded onto the top of the vehicle, tied into an impressive pyramid by a net of strong ropes.

The tiger’s meaty shoulders stood level with Svetlana’s chin. Its fur smelled like wild grass in summer, and she longed to run her hand through it. She resisted the urge as it turned to sniff at her, showing its magnificent fangs. She heard a rumble deep in its mammoth chest, and its big pink tongue licked at her boots. The servant who had brought the carriage around leaped off the driver’s bench and ran back to the stables.

Svetlana had arrived early in the yard with satchel, cloak, sword, and pistol. Ready to go at sunrise, as requested. She stood before Domo’s waiting carriage awhile. Apothecaries and their wavy-eyed servants rushed up and down the streets, but it was too early for much customer traffic. Both suns were up and the heat was rising fast. For a moment she considered climbing into the driver’s seat of the carriage and taking off without Domo. If she had any idea where to go, how to find Creep City on her own, she might have done it. Instead she crossed her arms and leaned against the side of the shop. The tiger took her cue and lay itself before the carriage, crossing its front paws and resting its chin. The traces that bound it to the coach were polished leather hung with silk and jewels.

“You must be the new muscle.” A deep voice from the other side of the carriage.

Two large, booted feet were visible. The coach hid the rest of whoever stood there. Svetlana moved behind the vehicle to get a look at the new arrival, but she found nobody standing there.

“Slow,” said the voice. “Too slow.”

Behind her. She whirled and something darted from her line of vision. It was inhumanly fast. She reached for Takamoto’s sword and cursed. The handle wasn’t there above her shoulder-blade where it should be. The scabbard was empty.

“Looking for this?” She turned.

The gleam of Takamoto’s steel she recognized immediately. The figure holding it took awhile longer. One of the reptoids that served as the guardsmen of Nil leaned against the doorjamb precisely where she had been standing seconds earlier. His scaled body was covered by form-fitting silvery armor, mostly along the limbs and midsection. Svetlana identified seven points of weakness in that first half-second: ankles, knees, wrists, elbows, underarms, groin, and neck. None of those areas was covered by the silver metal, but each spot did have dense and scaly skin to protect it. Then there was his head, handsome in its own grand ugliness.

A twin set of bone ridges lined the top of his skull. A pair of vertically slitted eyes gleamed yellow above a sloping snout that ended with flared nostrils. The reptoid’s fangs were miniature versions of the tiger’s, but his toothy grin was altogether human. A forked tongue darted in and out between the fangs. His scales were an uneven blend of green and black, or perhaps they were of a green so dark that it resembled black.

A pistol hung at the lizard-man’s side, and a rifle lay across his back. Neither of his weapons looked like those of Svetlana’s world, but their shapes were unmistakable. Her own pistol was made of dark metal, but the reptoid’s gear was polished silver like his armor. She took all of this in while the reptoid stared at her and twirled Takamoto’s sword, taunting her like a child who had stolen a toy.

“I don’t need that sword to kill you,” Svetlana said.

The reptilian smile widened. “You didn’t even know I was here,” he said. “You’ll have to be more alert if you’re going to work for Domo.” He reversed the sword, offering her the grip while the blade lay naked in his palms. It could have been a dare to use it against him. If it was, she didn’t take the bait.

“Who are you?” she asked, sheathing Takamoto’s blade.

“Bruno,” said the reptoid. His yellow eyes flashed in the sunlight. “I work for Domo. Sixteen years now. He tells me he hired you to join this caravan. I say ‘Yes, Boss,’ but we both know he doesn’t need another guard.” The reptoid’s face came near to her as Bruno leaned forward. “So I ask myself: Why did he really hire you?”

“You’ll have to ask him yourself,” Svetlana said. She turned away from Bruno and put her back against the wall again. How much longer would Domo keep her waiting?

The reptoid continued staring at her. “I say he feels sorry for you. I say he’s sweet on you. Can you even fight?”

Svetlana closed her eyes.

When she opened them, Bruno had backed away. He inspected the ropes that tied the baggage onto the coach roof. Men had tried to bait her before, and she had learned to ignore it. Once they saw her skill at the hunt or in defense of the community, they gave her respect. This is how warriors bonded. If she was going to travel with Domo, she would have to establish a warrior’s bond with the lizard. Unless the customs of his own society prevented such a thing. Then she would have to make the entire journey enduring the heat of his scorn. She might have to kill Bruno if it came to that. A hundred such lizard-men would not keep her from finding Dima. She waited and kept her mouth shut. Bruno took his spot on the padded driver’s bench, and the tiger woke from its nap yawning.

Pepper Domo appeared in a cloud of powder, perfume, and flying silks. The front door of his shop burst open at the hands of two servants, and he swept through it in a robe of nine colors and carrying a scepter of gleaming glass. Whenever he took a step the air was filled with the tinkling of glass vials like tiny bells. His eyes at the end of their stalks blinked at the brightness of morning.

Spreading his arms wide, staring at his carriage fully prepared and the two bodyguards awaiting his pleasure, Domo sang in a high voice. The servants kneeled about him in reverence. The tiger purred like a great engine. Domo finished his song and the servants withdrew. The Apothecary turned his eyes to Svetlana and smiled with his sideways mouth.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said. “I see you’ve met Bruno.”

The reptoid nodded. Svetlana duplicated the movement.

“Years of experience,” said Domo, “the most trusted soul in all my retinue. Bruno has saved my skin more times than I can count. He was a great warrior among the Uxx people, you know. His people serve the Apothecaries in a generational pact because we helped them win the Batrachian War of 7013. Ah, but that’s enough for now. You’ll get to know us both better along the way.”

“How long?” Svetlana asked.

“Until?” Domo said.

“To reach Creep City,” Svetlana said.

Domo smiled and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Sweet girl, I can see that you have not travelled widely, so let me educate you. On the Thoroughfare we’ll be moving through an array of diverse Affinities–parallel dimensions–until we reach the world that includes our destination. Because time itself is a subjective concept, it is impossible to know exactly how long it will take to travel from Nil to Creep City. Also, atmospheric conditions can vary greatly from realm to realm, slowing down crossworld traffic at times. Too many variables, you see, to calculate an accurate estimate of our travel time.”

Svetlana said nothing. She heard the reptoid grunt with amusement.

“If I were to judge from previous excursions,” said Domo, “I’d say the fastest I’ve ever made it from here to there equals approximately 30 days, as time is measured here in Nil. Yet it has taken me as long as 93 Nillian days in other instances.”

Svetlana nodded, though she didn’t really understand.

A servant held the carriage door open and Domo climbed inside. “Svetlana, ride with me for now,” he called to her. “You can trade shifts with Bruno later.”

Bruno grumbled. “Sweet on you…”

Svetlana climbed into the opulent interior of the coach. Two cushioned benches faced one another across a floor of shaggy pink carpet. On the far side, beneath the single window, sat a lone travelling trunk. Domo opened the lid and the container expanded into a shelf containing four rows of tiny and mid-sized vials. His private supply of serums, potions, and whatever liquid miracles he chose to bring alone.

Domo whistled and the carriage rumbled down the avenue toward the Thoroughfare. The Solbred were following the road between worlds back to their riverbed path, and it would lead them home. The carriage turned in the opposite direction when it reached the stone road. Domo spread the curtains so he and Svetlana could watch the odd population of Nil as the carriage rolled along.

Domo mixed a cocktail of serums in a glass goblet and made another for Svetlana. “Here you are, my dear,” he cooed. “This blend of meganutrients and unified field resonance drippings will sustain you for several days.”

Svetlana refused the potion.

Domo insisted. “No, you must drink. This is the Traveler’s Blend. After imbibing its powers you will not need to sleep or eat much for the first half of our journey. It also will keep you alert and ready for action. It is outrageously expensive if you do not work for an Apothecary.”

Svetlana accepted the fizzing cup. It tasted like citrus juice, dancing and buzzing in her mouth, then in her stomach. When the cup was empty she felt like getting out and running alongside the carriage. Beyond the window now the red sky and golden desert had replaced the ruins of Nil.

“You see?” Domo sipped at his own cocktail. “What did I tell you?”

Svetlana smiled. It was pleasant inside the carriage. Soft and cool. The steady rumble of iron wheels on flat stone permeated everything.

“What is this road that runs between the worlds?” she asked. “Who made it?”

Domo’s eye-stalks quivered. “Well, you’re talking ancient history dear. Some great lost empire, I suppose it was. The Nexus is far older than all of us. It has always been here, tying the Affinities together. I suppose there was a time in some prehistoric era when parallel dimensions weren’t connected at all. Most philosophers say there are an infinite number of realities, all vibrating at different speeds along the time/space continuum. The Nexus includes only a fraction of those realities, yet still it links hundreds, perhaps thousands of worlds.”

Svetlana used a rag to clean the grime and sand from her pistol while Domo spoke. A single questions could keep him going indefinitely. The man loved to talk. Perhaps that was the real reason he had hired her. Simple companionship. Plus his pity for a mother grieving for a lost child.

Domo told a long and convoluted stories of empires transdimensional and intergalactic. Waves of organic and semi-organic beings traveling in and between parallel realities, establishing a crossworld set of rituals, guidelines, and customs. He read to her entries from a dusty old book taken from the secret chest under his seat. His “travelling library,” Domo called it. He recited poems said to be handed down from a great Golden Age long passed, when all the worlds knew peace and prosperity and unity. The Builders of the Nexus must have lived during that time, he mused, while their shining empire spanned time and space like a dream. He read to her ancient epics about the era of darkness that followed when that dream collapsed. She would have preferred direct factual information, but she learned quite a lot from Domo’s classical poetry.

This original proto-empire had birthed hundreds of lesser empires across the Nexus. These lesser realms fell too, one by one, in the tumultuous ages that followed. The cosmos fell into chaos, but the Nexus remained, the eternal road between the worlds. The poems never gave a proper name to this theoretical Original Empire. A reference to “Roman roads left like scars across the fields of England” sounded familiar to Svetlana. She had read something like it in a moldering textbook when she was a child. Her father and mother had tried to preserve books whenever possible, but they were fragile things prone to wetness and flame. She remembered mostly the books’ faded images of the world her ancestors had lost. Another dead empire.

“So this great empire died,” Svetlana said, “leaving behind its road between the worlds. A road of indestructible stone.”

“We do know the road is protected against entropy and temporal dissolution,” Domo said. “But we cannot know if these poems are factual or fantastical. Still, they do ring of ancient wisdom. It’s said that every lie contains a kernel of truth.”

Domo served her another cocktail, this one a blue and syrupy concoction that gave her a feeling of raw confidence. Outside the window the desert rolled by, a backdrop of lazy dunes as patient as the eternal road itself.

“What do you imagine brought this Original Empire to its end?” she said.

The Apothecary shrugged and sipped his cocktail.

“Time is the greatest enemy of any empire,” said Domo. “Although I’ve read books suggesting the rise of the Potentates of Urbille set the crossworld decay in motion. Some even say the dreadful power of the Potentates unleashed a wave of entropy that washed over the Nexus like a transdimensional storm, toppling a thousand empires like mirror images of the original. Other sages believe it was this interdimensional decay–a naturally occurring cosmic phenomenon–that allowed the Potentates to seize control of the Nexus.”

“Who are these Potentates?” she asked.

“They are the Lords of Urbille, which lies at the exact center of the Nexus,” Domo said. “An ancient metropolis where the Potentates hold their court. They are also known as Masters of the Nexus, World Tenders, and Veiled Ones. A network of worlds provides them endless tribute. Our world used to as well, back in the days of my grandfather. But the Urbille forgot about us hundreds of years ago. We are too far from the center of the Nexus. Or perhaps we’ve run out of anything worth taking. Who can say?”

“You mentioned Aphelion last night,” Svetlana said.

“Oh, yes,” said Domo, “the unquenchable fire of glory, the city of cities, a living dream of metropolitan perfection–that is Aphelion. How I would love to see its gleaming gates and its dreamspun walls before I pass on. I would offer ten thousand serums for the chance to meet its glorious Triple Monarch.”

“So it’s real? Like the Urbille?”

Domo’s eyes bulged on the ends of their stalks. “Oh, you heard Gehosopha doubting my belief in Aphelion. I’ve yet to encounter concrete proof of its existence, but I’ve heard many a tale and story. I’ve even purchased an item or two said to have been manufactured in Aphelion. Trinkets and the like. Tiny wonders. It’s impossible to verify these things for the most part.”

“You think the Angel–the Silverwing–comes from Aphelion?”

“It’s quite possible, my dear,” said Domo. “I really cannot say. That is precisely why we are going to see the Mummy Lords. Well, that and to sell my wares.” He lay a palm on her knee. “Patience must be your shield. Hope is already your greatest weapon.”

The carriage rolled to an abrupt stop. The tiger roared in his traces.

“Go!” said Domo. “Bruno needs your support.”

Svetlana opened the carriage door and stepped outside. The hot desert wind brought sweat oozing from her pores. She squinted ahead of the carriage, past the growling tiger. A gateway exactly like the one she’d found in Omiska stood directly ahead. The pale road ran directly between two obelisks engraved with alien formulae. Beyond those obelisks the road was smothered in drifts of sand. Obviously the Thoroughfare’s self-cleaning capacity only covered the space between world-gates. She knew that walking between those obelisks would be walking into another world. Or rolling, in the case of the carriage. The problem, the reason Bruno had stopped, was the band of armed vagabonds standing on the road between carriage and gateway.

The carriage door closed behind her and a metal bolt clunked into place. An iron plate dropped down to shield the window on the coach’s far side. In the blink of an eye Bruno was no longer sitting on the driver’s bench, but standing in front of the tiger with his rifle raised.

The desert wind howled between the scattered stones. Svetlana knew these men were bandits, robbers, no better than the ones who had come every season to murder and exploit her village. None of them were human, but she recognized the same desperate look in their milky eyes, the same crude hunger in the way they held blade, spear, and gun. Several of them held greatbows with arrows aimed specifically at Bruno. The carriage sat behind the reptoid, an iron egg with Domo tucked safely inside.

The bandits wore scraps of leather and rusted metal. Their bodies were largely humanoid, although some were taller than Bruno. A band of misfits and tentacled freaks, they numbered at least fifteen. Their spokesman stood at their center, a glinting rifle propped against his shoulder. It looked exactly like Bruno’s weapon, probably stolen from one of his fellow Uxx.

Svetlana guessed the play: The tiger would protect the carriage while Bruno and she handled the bandits.

“You wish to pass, we require tribute,” said the leader. His snout was horned like a rhino. The visor of a dirty bronze helm hid his eyes.

“This is a free road,” said Bruno. He held the rifle steady.

A round of nervous laughter swept through the bandits’ ranks. Tentacles quivered and whipped the air. Someone’s high laugh sounded like a baying hound.

“This porte belongs to us,” said the rhino. “One last chance…pay or die. We’ll accept the female if you like.”

Svetlana had moved around the tiger to stand near Bruno. The lizard-man ignored her. Obviously he was used to handling these types of threats alone. She slid Takamoto’s blade from its scabbard.

“I think she’s made her decision, boys,” said the rhino. The archers let six arrows fly at Bruno. But the reptoid was no longer there. The shafts were matchsticks to the big tiger, who batted them out of the air like buzzing gnats. Svetlana watched a green and silver blur move through the ranks of the bandits, its path punctuated by grunts, screams, or growls ever half-second. A few dizzy seconds later came the slap of Bruno’s leathery tail against the road. He stood silent behind the group now. A broad-bladed knife in his hand dripped crimson.

Half the bandits squirted blood from their necks, abdomens, or heads. Severed tentacles fell to the ground. Bandits dropped pistols and rifles to clutch at their own bleeding bodies. Svetlana grinned. Bruno had taken out most of the gunmen. The rhino still held his rifle, but rest of them brandished simpler weapons. Someone tried to spear the reptoid, but Bruno was a blur again. The spearman died in a splash of red, intestines spilling across the road.

The rhino ignored the screams of his men and aimed his rifle at Svetlana.

She lunged forward, sweeping Takamoto’s blade low from left to right. The rifle burped a beam of purple light that flew right above her head. She felt the heat of the bolt passing as her blade sliced through ankle tendon and bone. The rhino fell to the road, spewing gore from the stump where his foot used to be. He howled like a dying wolf.

A bandit rushed at Svetlana while Bruno carved a red path from one to the next. Bright blood spattered his armor. His weapon was half the length of Takamoto’s sword, and twice was wide. Yet he moved so fast she could not clearly observe his technique. She sidestepped the arc of a bandit’s spiked mace and sliced his throat open with an upward swing. He fell bleeding at her feet.

The rhino was trying to stop the blood spurting from his severed ankle. Everyone was dead or dying now. The bandits lay in pieces, choking in pools of their own blood. Svetlana stood over the rhino. He might live on as a cripple, if the blood loss didn’t kill him. On Svetlana’s home world he would never make it. His own people would kill him out of mercy. A one-footed man couldn’t run or hunt or avoid predators. Or defend his family.

She stood over him, blade pointed down. He rolled over, pulling off his helmet and staring at her with piggish eyes. “Please…” he begged, lifting stumpy red fingers toward her. His rifle lay nearby, but it might as well be a hundred kilometers away. He was done fighting. “Please…” He wasn’t exactly human, but he wept like one. His yellow teeth gnashed as he begged for his life. Svetlana kicked the rifle away.

A flash of silver nearby surprised her. Bruno had drawn his pistol. He lowered the barrel to the rhino’s damp forehead. The man’s eyes swiveled to look at him. Svetlana opened her mouth to say “Don’t kill him,” but the first word had not left her mouth when Bruno pulled the trigger. A blast of purple light turned the rhino’s head into a smoking stain on the road. The heat of the bolt also cauterized the wound instantly, so the corpse lay spurting blood from its ankle yet none at all from the raw space between it shoulders.

“This is a free road,” Bruno said.

He holstered the gun and climbed back into the driver’s bench. He waited a moment for Svetlana to climb up alongside him, then spoke a Word of Command. The tiger grabbed a twitching body in its jaws and lumbered forward. A portable snack for the big carnivore. Svetlana heard its teeth crunching through bone as the carriage rolled past the scene of slaughter.

The green tiger disappeared through the invisible plane between obelisks, pulling the carriage after it. Svetlana recognized the sensation of falling again, although this time she felt the carriage and the tiger were falling with her. The impression was gone in an instant, and the coach was rolling on the other side of the gate.

Cold rain pelted Svetlana’s face. The dry desert air was gone, replaced by storm winds. The carriage moved along a high pass, a deep and foggy gorge yawning on one side of the road, a raw mountain wall on the other side. The tiger roared at the rain but did not slow its pace. It knew this road, as did Bruno. The carriage raced around the mountain as lightning swirled above the peaks. Next the road ran along the top of a narrow ridge, then brought the carriage into a forest of trees thick with yellow leaves and turquoise fruit. A waterfall thundered into the hidden depths of the ravine.

Svetlana raised her hood against the rain. It was a refreshing change of climate, but too sudden. She wanted to go back inside the carriage with Domo, but did not want to appear weak to Bruno. The lizard-man had killed thirteen men to her two. One, if you count his final shot.

“Who were they?” she asked, yelling through the rain.

“Lo-tech raiders,” said Bruno. “Parasites of the road. Scavengers and outlaws. Crossworld scum.” She saw the long knife now, in a scabbard tightly bound to his left thigh. She had completely missed it before. Bruno hadn’t drawn his sidearm until the fight was over. He must prefer to fight with the knife. Or could it be some unspoken reptoid custom that made him choose blade over pistol? She knew better than to ask for the secrets of his skill.

“What world is this?” she asked.

“It is the world that rains,” Bruno said. “I do not know the name of it. Ask Domo.”

“How many more worlds before we reach Creep City,” she asked.

Bruno roared with laughter. “Many more,” he said. “We’re parsing the Affinities. Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Svetlana kept her eyes on the curiously shaped trees. Some kind of birds or monkeys were moving among the branches, taking shelter from the storm. A peal of thunder split the gray sky and she wished she was inside drinking one of Domo’s cocktails. The rainy day gave way to night and the road sloped downward to a flat plain where the ruins of a great city lay moldering in the mud. From the rainy heights, she saw the Thoroughfare winding directly through the ruins. It ran from there across a dark plain and disappeared into a woodland.

A row of yellow moons rose and a few bright stars poked through the cloud cover. Immediately after the rain stopped, a pack of flying things descended on the carriage. Svetlana thought they were bloated bats until they swept in close enough to see better. Each one was a flying, bodiless head with black-feathered wings sprouting from the skull where ears should have been. They reminded her of the clustered heads of the Solbred, except for the wings and the fact that each flying head bore a single bulging eye. Their noses were pointed and their mouths full of jagged fangs. They screeched like starving children as they swarmed the carriage. The tiger stopped and swiped its front claws at them, spilling feathers across the air. A trio of heads dug their fangs into the feline’s back and sucked at its blood like leeches.

Bruno picked them off one by one with bolts of light from his pistol. They sizzled in the rain as he shot them down. One of the heads battered Svetlana’s eyes with its greasy wings, biting at her raised forearm. She grunted and grabbed her own pistol as the fangs pierced her skin. She put a bullet between the head’s eyes, then shot another one through its jaw before it could bite her leg. Then her left arm went dead.

Tongues like pointed snakes shot from the mouths of the heads, first wrapping around Bruno’s pistol arm, then Svetlana’s. Bruno’s free hand came up with his knife, and he stood upon the driver’s seat slashing at the creatures. Svetlana shot a few more heads down, firing until her gun was empty. Her left army hung numb at her side, and her head was foggy. Bruno’s knife was ridding the tiger of the heads leeching it.

Thunder broke in the sky above the mountain. The rain returned in full force, and the flock of heads relented. The survivors flew into the night. Bruno opened the door to check on Domo. The Apothecary took one look at Svetlana and demanded that she come inside. Bruno resumed his driving position and the vehicle rolled on as Domo treated Svetlana’s bite.

“The bite of these things is poisonous and eventually fatal,” Domo said. He cleaned the entry wound with a damp cloth. “But don’t worry, I always have the antidote prepared for this journey. Bruno and his tiger are immune to the poison.” She drank the serum and he bandaged her arm. Then another dose of the blue cocktail. Her wet clothes began to dry inside the warm coach.

She slept for awhile in the comfortable seat. When she awoke the window showed the road running along the edge of a glistening ocean. She peered out the window, blinking. The sky was a deep green, with a constellation of pearly moons hanging over the black expanse of waters. The smell of saltwater wafted through the open window. The antidote had made her sleep longer than she planned.

“We’ve passed into another Affinity,” said Domo, sensing her disorientation. “This realm is far more pleasant, as you can see.” He waved at finger at the window and took a deep breath of the salty air.

“An ocean,” said Svetlana, admiring its wild beauty. She had seen oceans in books, but it wasn’t the same. The vastness of wide open space threatened to suck the breath from her lungs. It made her feel small and insignificant. It was beauty and danger made one.

“I have never seen an ocean before,” she told Domo. “Only in pictures.” It was wonderful and somewhat terrifying.

“Oh, well, this segment of the Thoroughfare stretches along the Sea of Forgettings. You may want to ride up front to get the full experience. It’s quite a view. Sometimes you’ll catch a glimpse of the leviathans who live in the sea. They emerge now and then from the waves like tiny islands, and one can easily see them from the road.”

Svetlana opened the door and climbed onto the driver’s seat. Bruno sat at the reins, impassive as usual. A single sun burned in the green sky. The moons here were of all sizes, and too many to count. On the opposite side of the road lay the ruins of another great city. A field of half-buried slabs and fallen crystal towers overlooked the sea cliffs. Once it had been a spectacular thing, this city by the sea. Another lost capitol in shards. Nothing moved among the hills of crystalline wreckage.

Bruno offered no welcome when Svetlana climbed up to sit beside him. She gave him a vial of refreshment from Domo. He opened it, drained it, and gave her back the empty bottle.

“Killed nine more men at the last porte,” he said, “while you slept.”

“More bandits?”

“No,” Bruno said. “Slavers.”

“Is there always killing on these trips?” she asked.

The ocean was dark and calm, sparkling with sunset.

“Always,” said Bruno.

She studied the flat horizon, eager to catch a glimpse of the leviathans Domo had mentioned. “Is there anywhere along the Nexus where men can live in peace?”

“Many worlds lie along the Nexus,” said Bruno. “Most are peaceful because they have already died. There is nobody and nothing left to fight. Yet some are still dying, so their inhabitants rage against death. There can be little peace on a dying world.”

“Are all the worlds we pass through either dead or dying?”

“Everything dies eventually,” Bruno said. “Our job is to postpone it as long as possible. So we fight. It is the way.”

“In this all worlds are the same,” Svetlana said. “Everybody wants to live.”

Bruno laughed. “Not true. Some only want to die. Some are unable to do so. You will see this when we get to Creep City.”

A great dark shape rose from the ocean out near the horizon. A head and shoulders large as a mountain, gleaming like black iron, it stood gazing at the mainland. For a moment Svetlana thought it might walk out of the sea and scoop up Domo’s carriage in one of its colossal fists. Yet the leviathan only stood and stared at its dying world.

The carriage rolled on, perhaps beneath its notice.

 

NEXT: “Skiptrain”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 6

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HARMONA

Chapter 6.

The StoneFathers

The shrine of the StoneFathers lay deep beneath the walls of HearthHome. The cavern was far older than the stone towers that grew from it like trees growing from hidden roots. Harmona stood amid thirty-nine faces set along the curving walls, each one three times her size. Beards of green ivy hung from their craggy chins, and the hollows of their eyes were dark with shadow.

The flame atop her staff lit the chamber in hues of emerald. The faces of the StoneFathers stared at the center of the shrine, where Harmona stood on a dais of marble. She sang the words of Waking, Reverence, and Gratitude.

The stone faces opened their eyes, weeping rays of amber light. The green glow diminished in their collective brilliance. Harmona wiped at the tears drying on her cheek. “Ancient Ones, we need your help,” she said. Even now her thoughts raced back to Dorian, legless and bleeding on a cot in the infirmary. Possibly he was already dead. She could do no more for him than the physicians could, and this errand could not wait. The girls had not seen their father’s condition yet, but there would be no hiding it from them.

A granite mouth opened with the sound of grinding of stones. A deep voice filled the cavern. “Be brave, little one.” Harmona turned to the Seventeenth Father, the first to speak. She spilled out the details of the attack on the hunters, but the voice cut her off.

“We know.” The words sank in the chamber like stones in deep water.

“What’s happening?” Harmona asked. Despite her determination to stop weeping, her eyes would not play along. She rubbed them with the hem of her sleeve.

“This day was foreseen by us,” said the Seventeenth Father.

“The Yicori have found you,” said the Ninth Father.

“Do not despair,” said another. “This was foreseen.”

“We will guide you, child,” said the Seventeenth, “as we have always done.”

“You knew?” Harmona said. “All this time we’ve been here and you knew these things were out there?”

“We know everything about this primitive world,” said the Fifteenth Father.

“Do not despair,” said the Eighth, coughing out a bit of sand.

“You brought us here,” Harmona said, “you and Wail. You told us it was safe. You said Gaeya would be our home. Ours.”

“So it has been,” said the Fifteenth.

“So it is,” said the Seventeenth.

“We have planned for this,” said the Third Father’s face. Harmona spun to face it.

“Your plan did not including warning us? You waited years for them to start killing us, and now you’re telling me not to worry about it. Where is Wail? I want to speak with Doctor Wail.”

“You ask too many questions at once,” said a face.

“And make demands of us,” said another.

“Doctor Wail brought you to Gaeya at our instruction,” said the Seventeenth Father. “We built this citadel for you, opened the nine wells. We taught you how to live in this place, revived the basic survival skills that your race had long forgotten. You would have died in a matter of weeks if not for our intervention. We built HearthHome for you, and you have done well. Your numbers grow. Yet you do not live outside of time as we do, so you must always contend with elements of change. Your temporal existence demands the chemistry of evolution. Change creates conflict and conflict creates growth. Your people have done well so far. Now they must grow.”

“Or die,” said the Thirty-Ninth Father.

“So it’s not a paradise after all, is it?” Harmona said. She sat down on the top step of the dais. The black staff leaned across her knees as she rested head in hands. The anger had come and gone in a flurry of emotions, and now she felt numb. Something significant was happening. Something that would change everything. Forever.

My husband is dying.

The tears welled again, and she shouted through them at the faces.

“I don’t understand!”

“Calm yourself, child,” said the Fifth Father. “The time has come for you to know the truth. This world is not yours alone. The Yicori dwell in the high trees of the far ranges, where your people have never hunted until now. We anticipated that one day the New Organics would have to take this world from these primitives. So we made HearthHome far from the Yicori territories, giving your people time to grow their numbers, adjust to their new lives here, and learn the hunting skills that will make them excellent warriors.”

“Warriors?” Harmona said. “You brought us here to make war on these creatures? To fight for dominance like animals in a pit?”

“We brought you here to free you from the Potentates of Urbille,” said the Seventeenth Father.

“You could never have fought the Potentates for dominance,” said the First Father. “Here you have an excellent chance to establish a permanent foothold for your species.”

“We saved your kind from annihilation,” said the Seventeenth.

“You have adapted well here,” said the Thirtieth Father, “with our aid.”

“You think I forget this?” Harmona said. She forced herself to stand again. Her knees were unsteady, so she leaned on the staff. “You want to forge us into the defenders of paradise. A paradise we have yet to earn. Will this blood buy us peace? Why can we not live side-by-side with these Yicori? There must be another way. Something besides war and death and suffering.”

“The Yicori have great appetite for human flesh,” said the Seventeenth Father.

“It is true,” said the Thirtieth.

“A hundred thousand years ago they existed in great hordes all over this continent,” said the First Father. “Voracious and strictly carnivorous, they devoured every other mammalian species into extinction. This created a series of massive die-offs, as the remaining tribes turned to cannibalism. This last tribe of Yicori has survived for a thousand years by preying on the myriads of avian species in the worldforest. When times are lean they still revert to cannibalism. Yet now they have discovered another mammalian race to prey upon, and the appetite consumes them like a fever. There is now other way. The New Organics must fight to survive on Gaeya. It is the next stage in your extraordinary evolution.”

“The Yicori must be destroyed,” said the Seventeenth Father.

“Every last one of them,” said the First.

“Only when this is done,” said the Seventeenth, “will this world belong to you.”

“I understand,” Harmona said. “But I don’t have to like it.”

“One does not have to ‘like’ a war in order to win it,” said the Seventeenth Father.

Harmona sighed. “War,” she said. She knew the word from books, histories, plays, and legends, things she was exposed to in the Urbille or while travelling the Nexus with the Rude Mechanicals. She understood that it was senseless and brutal, that it trampled the innocent, that it cost lives and souls. She knew war as a concept. Yet now she had seen real blood, and she feared war for the first time. Yesterday it was only an idea from history. Today her husband was dying, her people were going to war, and the idea had become a deadly reality.

“The Yicori will find HearthHome eventually,” said the Seventeenth Father,” but there is time.”

“Time to prepare,” said the Fifth.

“Time to learn,” said the Fourth.

“We have taught you hunting, agriculture, medicine, letters, philosophy, and many other disciplines that make a self-sufficient community,” said the Seventeenth. “Now we will share with you the sacred arts of metallurgy, weaponsmithing, and armoring. The primeval powers of your distant ancestors, the heroes of the Organic Age, shall live again in you.”

“Your people have mastered the hunt and learned the land,” said the Third Father. “The time of Knife and Spear is over. The time for Sword and Shield is upon you. We who are masters of the stones will provide you with precious ores for your smithies and forges. From the wisdom of stone you will build an Age of Metal. Your skins shall be metal and the metal in your hands shall be swift and devastating. Your people will face these tree-climbers and hew them down.”

“The Yicori are beasts, their only weapons claw and fang,” said the Eleventh Father. “But the earth holds many secrets that belong to the StoneFathers. These secrets shall be yours. Your thirty bands of hunters will become thirty companies of soldiers, and the Yicori will fall before them.”

“With our help you will exterminate these flesh-eaters,” said the First Father.

“How much time do we have?” Harmona said. “How many days?”

“That is not for us to say,” said the Seventeenth Father.

“Call your councils to order,” said the Nineteenth. “Prepare your Artisans.”

Harmona had heard enough. She stepped down from the dais.

Dorian needs you. Go to him now, before it’s too late.

But something else nagged at her. Something the StoneFathers were not telling her. If they could hide the existence of the Yicori for twelve years, what else might they be hiding? She stopped before leaving the shrine.

“Summon Dr. Wail,” she said to all of the faces at once. “I want to speak with him.”

“That is not–“

She cut off the voice: “Did he know too? Did Wail know these things were out there waiting to eat us? Did he know about your plans for us to exterminate them?”

The StoneFathers were silent. Their open eyes gleamed like golden moons.

Harmona walked toward the exit.

“Call your councils,” said one of the faces.

“Do not despair,” called another.

Harmona ran up the steps. It had been so peaceful before Anton’s interruption at the play rehearsal and the doomed hunting party’s return. Paradise had fallen apart in a matter of minutes. Of course it never really was the paradise she’d thought it was. She was a fool, and so were the rest of the New Organics. Fools who trusted Wail and the StoneFathers.

She entered the infirmary a few minutes later. The wounded hunters had fallen into slumber, and their wives sat among the bustling physicians, many serving as nurses. Every woman of HearthHome knew how to tend a wounded hunter. It was one of the first things you learned on Gaeya. A basic survival skill. She heard the StoneFather’s voice echo in the back of her head: You have adapted well here…with our aid.

Duval sat next to Dorian’s cot, watching over him as he slept. He’s doing my job. She banished the thought and touched Duval’s shoulder as she sat beside him.

Duval’s torn hunting clothes had been replaced by a white robe, and the bandages on his left cheek were seeping red. They would need changing soon.

Duval looked at her with sad eyes red as raw meat.

“He’s been asking for you,” Duval said. “I’ll go…”

“Stay,” Harmona whispered. She squeezed his unbandaged shoulder. She leaned forward to inspect Dorian’s wounds. His skin was pale and blue veins showed in his face. The stump of his left leg had been cauterized and bandaged. His left arm was wrapped from pit to wrist. The seeping redness there spoke of horrible damage. His brow was hot and clammy. She dipped a rag in a bowl of water, lay it across his forehead, and kissed his cheek. His eyes wavered and blinked at her. His right hand moved toward hers, but he couldn’t raise it. She took his hand and held it to her chest, moved her face closer to his. A tear fell on his chin. She wiped it away.

“The girls…” he said.

Harmona nodded. “I haven’t told them yet. Don’t try to speak. Just rest now, and I’ll bring them to you first thing in the morning.”

“No,” Dorian coughed and black blood spewed from his lips. “Bring them…bring them now.”

Harmona called a physician over and sent a messenger to summon her daughters. She met them outside the infirmary doors. They were already in tears. She re-explained what rumor and common sense had already told them. She led them inside to hug their father one by one. Dorian whispered something into each of their ears. His right hand raised toward Harmona again. The girls ran to Duval, who stood like a protective grandfather between them and the death that was fast approaching.

Harmona leaned in close, ready for Dorian’s last words.

“I love you,” she said. “I always have.”

“Since…since the day you joined…the Mechanicals. I remember…” Dorian lost his voice. He seized up and the girls wept loudly. Harmona held him until the seizure passed.

His pale blue eyes focused directly on hers. “They’re not apes…” he said. “Large craniums…some kind of language…” He grabbed her hand now with all of his fading strength. “Predators…walking like tigers…climbing like monkeys… Harmona, they…they ate my leg.”

She tried to calm him with her cheek against his. His skin felt aflame. Brix and Chancey came to join the family in its grief. Elodie and Sabine went to embrace them, while Astrid remained wrapped about Duval’s waist. All of the girls’ eyes were on their dying father.

Dorian inhaled a great gulp of air and lifted his head from the pillow. His voice was a rasping croak. “You have to kill them…before they…”

His head fell back and Harmona stroked his flat chest.

He stared into her face. “Kill them…” he said again. “Save the girls…”

The light faded from his eyes.

Harmona wept over his body with the girls until the physicians carried it away. Dorian had only ever wanted to be an actor, but he ended up a hunter, father, and leader. He had died before the StoneFathers could forge him into a warrior.

So would everyone at HearthHome unless they made that transition.

Later, after the girls had cried themselves to sleep in their mother’s bed, Harmona sat alone near the fireplace. She studied Dorian’s flint-blade knife. The handle was carved from the bone of a blue condor he had killed years ago. His favorite hunting bow hung on the wall across from the bed. These were the weapons of a peaceful man. A peaceful people. Bird-hunters.

She dropped the knife into the flames and watched its bone handle darkening. The loops of copper wire securing bone to flint began to melt. Soot swelled like darkness in the updraft. Soon there was nothing left but ashes and a shard of blackened stone.

####

The next few days were a grey blur of council meetings, funerals, and trying to help the girls deal with their grief. Harmona was so busy running HearthHome that it took three days for Dorian’s death to really sink in. On the third day she collapsed in the blue garden after a mid-morning council, unable to breathe. Elodie’s older sisters were still in tutoring sessions, and the little girl broke down as well when her mother fainted.

Harmona woke in her bed surrounded by the girls along with Brix and Chancey. They had suspended their play due to the attack and the following wave of panic. There would be no festival either. She heard them arguing in whispers before they realized she was awake.

“Funerals and plays don’t mix,” said Brix.

“People are sad and worried,” said Chancey. “They need this.”

“Not now, Chancey,” Brix said.

“Oui, Monsieur Directeur,” Chancey said.

“Mother!” Elodie was the first to notice her awake. Astrid and Sabine leaned over the bed and hugged her. Sabine lifted Elodie so she could join the hugging.

“Duval is outside, Mother,” said Sabine. “He sat by door all night.”

“I slept all night?” Harmona kissed her daughters. She squeezed Chancey’s hands in her own and he kissed her forehead. Brix gave her a gentle hug.

“You’ve run yourself ragged,” Brix said. “You’re no good to anyone unless you get some rest.”

“Stay here, Mother,” said Elodie. “You need to rest.”

Harmona stroked the girl’s straw-colored hair, the same shade as her father’s.

“One of the Artisans is making a statue of Father,” Astrid said. “The one called Tomaz.”

Harmona shook her head. “Statues will have to wait. We need all the Artisans making weapons and armor. The StoneFathers have already begun meeting with them and the LoreKeepers. The deep forges are lit, and ores are being processed according to the StoneFather’s dictates.”

“Not all of the Artisans are meeting with the StoneFathers,” said Chancey.

Brix frowned at him.

Harmona set up in bed, pulled back her mass of unruly hair. Her first night’s sleep in three days felt good. She winced at a stab of guilt for feeling anything good so soon after Dorian’s death.

You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to go on.

For the girls. For everybody else.

She rubbed her eyes. “Explain, please.”

Chancey grinned. “Astrid already told you. One of our best Artisans, a stoneworker, refuses to learn the New Arts. Aldo Crespus is his name. He’s already started on the sculpture of Dorian.”

Harmona saw the pain in her daughter’s soft eyes, the deep loss that could never be filled. Their father was gone forever. Surely that pain must even exceed her own. She had never even known her own father. She had lost her best friend and lover, but they had lost half their world. So have I. We must outlive this loss.

Show them how to move forward by honoring him.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad someone else objects to our current path. Take some extra salt and wine to Aldo Crespus. He is obviously a man of principle.”

Duval entered the room. His leather tunic and new hunter’s harness were polished. He carried a sheathed knife and a hunter’s spear, which he left near the doorway. His ruined cheek had begun to heal, but he still wore a half-mask of bandages. The look in his eyes was like shade on a hot day. His recently shaved beard was starting to emerge again, and his sandy hair was bound into a single braid. For the last seven years he was the closest thing Dorian ever had to a brother. They were both 26, a year younger than the oldest person in HearthHome.

Duval was an uncle of sorts to the girls. They ran to him. Suddenly Harmona realized the role he would play in her girls’ lives going forward. Duval’s presence was all that was left of Dorian. She smiled at him, grateful but unable to say it aloud.

“How are you feeling?” Duval asked.

“I am well,” Harmona said. “Well enough…”

Duval pulled up a stool. The girls set about finding a robe and breakfast for their mother. Brix and Chancey hovered in the corner, pretending not to listen. They were her oldest and dearest friends, but Dorian had known them longer. They were taking his death well, but now and then she saw Brix wiping a tear from Chancey’s face. Harmona wasn’t the only one determined to stay strong for the girls.

“I have news,” Duval said. “Another band of hunters returned with half their numbers missing. The Yicori attacked them too. This time on the western flats between the high ridges and the mossy bluffs. I spoke briefly with the survivors. The brutes came from the trees, like the ones that attacked my band–I mean to say Dorian’s band. We believe the Yicori are tracking the hunting parties, trying to find HearthHome.”

“They’re hunting us,” Harmona said. “The StoneFathers said they would. How many hunters are still outside the gates?” Any hunters who were gone for more than four days had no idea what was going on at HearthHome. They wouldn’t get the news of the Yicori attacks until they made it back. Or until the Yicori found them in the wild.

“Five bands,” said Duval. “The last one left six days ago.”

Harmona hurled a water bowl across the room, splashing the curtains. Elodie caught her breath and started to weep. Harmona got out of bed and picked up the six-year-old.

“It’s all right,” she told Elodie. Gradually the girl calmed down.

Duval waited for her to dress in the adjoining chamber before resuming their conversation over breakfast with the girls. They ate piping hot bread and sliced fruit. Hot tea or cold wellwater. Elodie wouldn’t drink any hot liquids, so she left the tea to the two older girls. Brix and Chancey went to welcome back the returning hunters in Harmona’s name. Duval ate little as he sat where Dorian would have been. The girls stuffed themselves, and Harmona forced herself to eat.

“He was my greatest friend,” said Duval. “I will miss him.”

“You are part of this family,” Harmona said. “Always.” She squeezed his hand.

“Do you believe what the StoneFathers say?” he asked. “Can kill them all with these new weapons? This…armor?”

“I think it’s what they’ve wanted us to do all along,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s why they brought us here.”

“Dorian told me they brought us here to defy the Potentates,” Duval said. “So that one day we might go back and topple them. Take the Urbille for ourselves.”

“Dorian liked Wail’s plan to do that,” Harmona said. “But he never convinced me of its wisdom. We have our own world now, so we don’t need to fear the Urbille or the Potentates. We have worse things to worry about.”

“He also said the Potentates were looking for us,” Duval said. “Wail told him they were searching for Gaeya and the escaped New Organics. If they find us they will wipe us out.”

“Wail says that a lot,” Harmona said.

Duval stared at her.

“He’s probably right,” she said. “Look, it’s been twelve years and they haven’t found us yet. They’re not going to. The Yicori are already here, and they will definitely wipe us out. We’ve been forced into a war, Duval. One that we have no choice but to fight.”

Duval grinned. “Sounds like an old book, or one of those legends from the Organic Age. You know the ones where a simple-minded farmhand ends up fulfilling an ancient prophecy to save his world from the forces of evil?”

“It sounds nothing like that to me,” she said. “But it does remind me of The Tempest.”

“The Tempest?”

“One of the Great Plays. Do you know it?”

“The Leaflings have never performed it.”

“Not yet,” she said. “The magician Prospero lives isolated on an island for twelve years. There he keeps his daughter Miranda safe from all his enemies both natural and mystical. Eventually, Prospero’s magic draws his enemies to the island where he manipulates them toward their doom.”

“I see,” Duval said. “The wizard triumphs.”

“Yes,” Harmona said. “But later he forgives his enemies and forsakes magic altogether. He only wants his daughter to be happy.” Her voice trailed off, following her thoughts.

“And was she?” Duval asked.

“What?”

“Was the wizard’s daughter happy in the end?”

“I don’t know,” Harmona said. “The play ends too soon. I think she was happy. She had found the man she loved…”

Harmona didn’t realize she was weeping until Duval put his arm about her shoulders. He pulled her close.

“Our ancestors endured war,” he said, “and they survived it. So shall we.”

“The StoneFathers say it’s part of our evolution,” she said.

“Then we must believe them,” Duval said.

She pulled away before the girls noticed the embrace.

“If we’re moving forward,” she asked, “why does it feel like we’re going backward?”

Duval gave her no answer.

It was time for the next council.

####

Day and night the people of HearthHome worked to prepare for what was coming. Harmona walked among the deep forges watching the red-hot metal flow like earthblood. The ore provided by the StoneFathers was light, maleable, and easily honed to razory sharpness. The first few blades to come off the forges were blessed with the names of the dead hunters etched into their hilts.

The first batch of swords was given to the LoreKeepers. After these men and women met with the StoneFathers, they came away with a new sense of purpose. They would be warriors now, and they would train others to be as well. A blast of light from the StoneFathers’ eyes filled their heads with awareness, technique, and fresh wisdom. They must hone this raw wisdom into physical prowess. The hunting bands were already great archers and masters of spear-throwing. Now the transfigured LoreKeepers schooled them in the arts of swordplay.

Duval and twenty-four other HuntMasters supervised the training yards. All day the first band of swordsmen practiced and dueled in protective leather tunics. The plan was to quickly reach a certain level of mastery with the weapons, then learn to do it all over again while wearing armor. The armorers, like the weaponsmiths, worked night and day. They traded shifts to keep the forgeries and smithies producing. Every man knew the Yicori were coming, so every man worked like a demon.

A few more bands of hunters arrived, most of them with good supplies of game for the larders, and none of them had met the Yicori. Yet another band returned in fear and exhaustion, missing five of their number. They told stories of hungry shadows dropping from the trees, hauling men away to their deaths. They had heard the screams of those who were eaten alive, and the rest of them ran for two days to get home.

Now all the roaming bands were accounted for, but the death toll had risen to forty-six hunters. Every citizen of HearthHome was safe for now inside the Outer Wall. Outlying fields and orchards were abandoned, their tenders harvesting too early whatever they could manage. Six of the nine wells lay beyond the Outer Wall, but the three wells inside the grounds would serve well enough.

Harmona walked among the sweating Artisans as they hammered metal into deadly shapes. The green glow of her staff made them smile as she passed. A leader must inspire her people and give them hope. She asked questions of their work, watching them turn raw ore into metal alloys and metal alloys into sword, armor, and shield.

An Artisan named Chumley begged the privilege of making a sword for her, but Harmona initially refused. “My staff will suffice,” she said. The power of the staff’s green flame was great, and its source was inexhaustible. It had been given to her by Sala North, the closest thing to a true mother Harmona had ever known.

She missed the Rude Mechanicals, and the days when she wandered the Thoroughfares as one of them, Dorian’s hand in hers. She missed performing for exotic audiences of outlanders, strangelings, and graveyard spirits. She missed making love to him in curious and hidden places, back when their love was something new and wonderful. It was that love that convinced her and Dorian to follow Wail here. They chose to build their lives around that love, and so forsake the only life they had ever known. That love had produced three beautiful daughters. She would do it all over again.

Chumley convinced her with eloquent words that the leader of a war-stricken people needed to carry a sword, if only to inspire those who would fight in her name. She watched as he folded the hot metal to create her own personal blade.

In the chambers of the armorers it was much the same. Breastplates, leg- and arm-guards, helmets, shields. All of these took shape as rapidly as the StoneFathers’ sacred wisdom could be applied. Therol, who used to be the Chief LoreKeeper, had her measured as soon as possible. She knew better by now than to argue. She had no wish to wear a metal skin, no matter how brilliant and craftily designed. But her people would need to see her sparkling in the dawn light, raising her green flame and her sword high to rally their spirits.

How else could she get them to go out and kill all those monsters?

She stayed among the forgeries long into the night, watching the future of her people being built with hammer, tongs, and anvil.

After midnight the gatemen sounded their watch horn, waking everyone who slept inside the citadel. Harmona knew her daughters must also hear the alarm up in the Hearthtower’s bedchamber. They would wake up frightened without her presence. She rushed toward the Great Hall and met a messenger as she entered the chamber.

“HearthMother! They’re climbing over the north wall!” The man pointed northward, cold horror in his eyes. “The Yicori have found us!”

No, it’s too soon. We’re not ready yet.

Harmona joined a trio of hunters headed for the wall. They gripped wooden spears with sharp flint heads. From the courtyard she saw Duval and a cluster of archers standing between the battlements. They fired volley after volley over the wall, aiming at the hungry things climbing it.

She rushed up the sentry steps to join them, the spearmen at her back.

We’re not ready!

Something faster than her eye could follow reached up and pulled an archer off the wall. His scream faded as he fell. A fanged monstrosity pulled itself up to crouch where the archer had been stationed. It was head-and-shoulders taller than any man, yet it crouched with slumped shoulders and a humped back. Matted white fur covered its body except for snout, palms, and feet. Its mouth was a pink maw filled with yellow fangs, big enough to snap off a man’s head. Six arrows protruded from its shoulders and back, yet it seemed to be ignoring them. More arrows broke now against its thick skin.

Its skull was twice as large as it should be, the bulk of it rising like a ripe melon from behind the smallish face. Two puffing slits served as a nose above its obscene mouth. Of all its horrid aspects, its eyes were the most disturbing. They looked across the parapet at Harmona. Black orbs bulging from their sockets beneath a simian brow. Constellations of alien stars glittered in the depths of those eyes. They were twin pools of night sky. Harmona looked into them for a half-second and knew these were intelligent creatures, not mindless beasts. Dorian had tried to tell her this before he died.

The Yicori grabbed a spearman by the neck and twisted his head off in a shower of crimson. Another spearman impaled it through the neck. The starry-eyed beast wailed and tried to pull the shaft from its neck, spurting gore across its pale fur. Its massive claws were already stained with New Organic blood. A second Yicori, also shot full of arrows, climbed up over the battlement.

Duval rushed between Harmona and the beast. It howled and might have ripped him apart if the spear in its neck hadn’t been such a distraction. Duval plunged a silver blade into the creature’s gut, twisting and driving it backward. He swept the sword sideways as the beast staggered backward. Clutching at its flailing intestines, it plummeted back the way it had climbed.

Another beast leaped up and swatted two archers away. It lurched toward Duval, who held his bloody sword awkwardly. The force of its massive body would crush Duval, if it didn’t simply knock him off the wall.

Harmona raised her staff and spewed a torrent of green flame that set the beast on fire. Its greasy fur blazed as Duval rolled to the side. The burning Yicori raged between the battlements, smashing at the stone with burning arms, stamping with clawed feet. Another Yicori climbed up behind it, so Harmona let another blast of flame engulf them both. The sentries took their spears and jabbed at the beasts until they fell from the wall like flaming balls of fur.

Clawed hands came over the wall’s rim, seeking purchase. Men rushed to stab at them with knife and spear. All this time archers were spraying the outside of the wall with arrows, but none of them had stopped the Yicori from climbing. Arrows were no better than thorns against this enemy.

“They’re still coming!” Duval shouted. He leaned against Harmona so they stood back-to-back. He stared over the edge toward the mass of climbing beasts.

“They are too many!” someone shouted, dropping a spear and running down the stairs. Another beast climbed over the battlements to squat atop the wall, and two more on either side of it. More claws rose up, digging their tips into naked stone.

Harmona poured gouts of green flame at the beasts. The Yicori streamed up the northern wall like spiders. Men died in pieces or ran screaming.

StoneFathers, help us! We are not ready!

A new beast leaped atop the battlements. It towered over her, fangs dripping red. Its breath stank of rotten meat, but its star-filled eyes stared at her. She caught a glimpse of something beautiful and eternal beneath the savage hunger.

It reached for her throat.

 

NEXT: “A Free Road”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 5

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CRAG

Chapter 5.

Special Dispensation

 

The Ministere de Justice was a monolith of glass and steel. It stood atop a crowded ridge overlooking the red valley of the Rusted Zone. Most of the buildings along the avenue were recycled institutions from the city’s various architectural eras, from Organic to Late Gothic to Retro-Modernism, so the result was a melange of old and new construction.

The crude angles and iron superstructures of the past mingled with neospires of steel and glass; nanotech smartdomes melded together by macrofiber networks; new and glistening skins grown over decrepit understructures thousands of years old. Architectural recycling at its finest, a baroque blend of styles influenced by a thousand different worlds. This was the Reclaimed Zone, where modernity overshadowed mouldering antiquity, and the Ministere de Justice was the perfect icon of that modernity. It sparkled white and blinding in the first light of morning.

Sunbeams pierced the windows of the lorrie. Crag awoke in the back seat at the prodding of a gendarme’s rifle butt. He kicked at the soldier’s head but didn’t really try to connect. The gendarmes moved away from the vehicle and allowed him to slide out. Crag wavered for a moment, the heat of good nitrate oils still burning in his belly gears. He turned back to grab his top hat. The Tribune was a stickler for appearances.

Crag adjusted his bronze face, pressed the hat down upon his skull, and followed the garden path toward the massive outer stairs. Statues lining the courtyard were made of bronze, faded and tarnished by age. The plants thriving here were synthetic recreations of real foliage, creations of the Ministere de Science whose personnel maintained the building. The banner of the Potentates hung crimson and black at the top of the steps, between pillars of silver and milky quartz.

The guards didn’t bother to nod or salute Crag as he passed. He was beneath their notice, just another tool of the Tribune like themselves. Crag tried not to look at the trio of jade gargoyles above the entrance. The sculptures always gave him bad vibes, yet he could never avoid staring at their reptilian faces. They stared back at him with green stone eyes, their mouths grinning with crooked tusks. Crag entered the central corridor through an open pair of immense doors. The walls were sterile, built of white alloy and stainless steel. The chairs were ornate, carved of ancient wood, lined with deep velvet. Porcelain-faced Beatifics stood along the walls in their finest coats and hats, waiting for access to the Tribune’s court. Some wore shackles at wrists and ankles with silent gendarmes looming at their shoulders.

Crag approached a second pair of doors somewhat smaller than the first. These were carved of ancient wood with intricate swirls and arcane patterns. A gendarme opened the right door as Crag approached. He was expected after all.

Inside the golden bench of the Tribune stood on a raised platform above the twin stands of prosecution and defense. Eight plastic couches sat below in two orderly rows for the comfort of observers. In all his years serving the Ministere de Justice, Crag had never seen anyone sitting on those couches. The Tribune heard cases and made judgments without an audience. Crag wondered why the couches were even there if nobody was ever going to use them. He slumped down on the rearmost couch. His coils sighed and his leg gears unlocked.

On the left wall stood a door marked ABSOLUTION. An identical door on the opposite wall read PUNISHMENT. Prisoners brought into the court were judged, sentenced, and dragged through one door or the other. In all his years at the Ministere de Justice, Crag had never seen anyone get the door of absolution. He wondered if anyone ever had walked through it, and if it led anywhere at all.

The Tribune’s gavel fell with a boom. Two gendarmes escorted a condemned Beatific from the bench to the door of punishment. As the door opened before him the man lost all sense of dignity and began screaming for mercy. They always did that. The gendarmes wrestled him through the portal, and the door slammed shut. The shrieks of the condemned man echoed for awhile from the other side, gradually fading into silence.

The Tribune finished scribbling something on a scroll with his peacock quill pen. The Ministere de Justice had a real taste for old-fashioned customs. That is to say Tribune Anteus had a thing for old-fashioned things, because he was heart and soul of the Ministere de Justice. This was the House of Anteus. Everyone here answered to the Tribune, and the Tribune answered only to the Potentates.

A miniature version of the Potentate’s banner hung above the Tribune’s high seat. The opaque veil that hid the Tribune’s face matched his spotless white robe. A long powdered wig hid the rest of his head. The walls of the court were etched with mosaics of ancient Beatifics wearing those types of wigs. Despite its external modernity the place was a bastion of tradition, a crucible of frozen history, and the only source of order in the grand chaos that was the Urbille. Crag was a part of that order. He was good at his job, even if he’d lost the heart for it.

The Tribune waved his long fingers, and the precious stones of his rings sparkled.

“Inspector Crag, you may approach.” A voice familiar as the Urbille itself. The Tribune’s regular speeches, delivered via high-frequency transistor, were the voice of the Potentates. It was a voice Crag had known all his life. Yet did anyone really know the Tribune? Crag reported to him directly on a case-by-case basis. He preferred to avoid it whenever possible. The urge to strangle the man until his pulpy brain oozed from his optical sockets had left Crag years ago. That wouldn’t have been any good for Caroline.

Crag stood before the high bench in the place where accused criminals were also made to stand. The Tribune had all his meeting like this. A constant reminder that he sat above everyone else, even his fellow agents of order. Anteus drummed his sharp nails against the golden bench as he spoke.

“Splendid work tonight,” said the Tribune. “We can always count on you, Crag. Was the apprehension difficult?”

“No apprehension,” Crag said. “The killer was sick. He had to be put down on the spot.”

The veiled faced stared at him.

“It was a matter of life and death,” Crag said.

“Very well,” said the Tribune. “You’ll find no dispute from me this time. We have more important things to discuss.”

“What’s more important than keeping the Urbille’s children safe?”

“Whatever serves the interests of the Potentates, Inspector.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In this case the matter does happen to involve the youngest members of our population. Perhaps it is related in some way to the case you just solved, but that is not for me to say.”

Crag waited.

“Are you familiar with the notorious highwayman known as the Surgeon?”

“I’ve read the reports,” Crag said. “Renegade Beatific, roams the Nexus robbing and murdering travellers; horseman, swordsman, handy with a pistol; supernaturally gifted; responsible for at least a dozen murders a year for the past decade.”

Crag had an optical for detail and an excellent memory. Caroline always said it was what made him good at his job. A half-dozen special agents had tried to track, entrap, or gun down the highwayman in the past ten years. Nobody ever found him. And nobody who went looking for him ever came back alive.

The Tribune waved a sheaf of papers. “Yes, yes, but have you seen the Red File?”

Crag reached up and took the folder. He opened it and scanned the document inside. It was marked CONFIDENTIAL: TRIBUNE ONLY in red ink. A list of dates and names; times and places; most of them along the Greater Thoroughfare, the others in and around the Urbille itself. Abductions. Some singly, some in groups.

Crag read the notations and recognized his own name on several cases. He slapped the folder down onto a wooden podium. “Missing persons cases from the last 12 years. Some of them were my cases. All of them unsolved…”

“Two hundred and sixty four unsolved cases,” said the Tribune, “and we suspect many more unreported losses. Do you see what all of these cases have in common?”

Crag had already noticed it. “They’re all minors. Young Organics. Pre-Conversion citizens of the Urbille.” He checked a row of data. “Seventy percent were stolen from Beatific families, the rest from Clatterpox.”

“And what does that suggest to you?”

“That somebody’s stealing children from the Urbille and he doesn’t play favorites.”

“That somebody is the Surgeon, Inspector,” said the Tribune. “And these are only the cases of youths taken from the Urbille itself. It doesn’t take into account hundreds more who were stolen right off the Greater Thoroughfare. Taken from the families of travelling merchants and private expeditions. Even an acting troupe lost four Young Organics who were travelling with them as apprentices.”

“So the Surgeon is stealing kids,” Crag said. “Children of all ages. He’s not murdering his victims for their wealth. He’s robbing them of their children.”

“He takes whatever wealth he can as well,” said the Tribune, “but we now know that his primary target is and always has been our children. He’s never taken anyone who has undergone Conversion.”

“No one under the age of sixteen,” Crag said. “Why? What is he doing with them all?”

“Now you’re asking the right questions, Inspector. I knew you were the man for the job.”

“What job, Excellency?”

“This child-stealer is no better than the child-killer you just eliminated,” said the Tribune. “To understand his motives, we must look at the man behind the reputation. You remembered that the Surgeon is a Beatific. What else do you know about him?”

“Not much. Rumors and whispers. Some say he’s a devil from Hell, others say he works for the Potentates. I’ve even heard it said that he’s not human at all.”

“No, Crag. The Surgeon used to be Doctor Aimon Wail, a gifted physician specialized in Conversion. Ranked extremely high among the Masters of Conversion Arts and Sciences. He earned six doctorial degrees in biomechanics and won three Adept Scrolls. He served the Potentates in the Ministere de Science for over two hundred years, during that time Converting thousands of Organic youths into magnificent Beatifics. A job so important one might see it as a sacred calling.”

“What happened?” Crag asked. “Something must have sent him over the edge.”

“Thirteen years ago Dr. Wail, by all accounts, went mad and murdered Supervisor Guillaume of the Ministere de Science. Evading capture by unknown means, Wail then disappeared and his Good Hills estate was burned to the ground. His wife Kalmea died in that fire, as did his son Alain who was approaching Conversion age.

Crag listened. At one time he would have asked what could possibly make a man go rabid and murder his own family. But he’d been on the job far too long for rookie questions. They had no satisfying answers, and they would only drive you insane if you didn’t let go of them. Some things weren’t meant to be understood.

“Shortly after Wail’s disappearance,” said the Tribune, “he began abducting Organic youths. At first we believed his actions to be an external force invading the Nexus, but we learned more every time he struck. Certain incantations used in the commission of his crimes revealed arcane secrets known only to Surgeons. A few years ago we confirmed Wail’s identity, but we still don’t know why he’s stealing Organics or where he’s taking them. We believe it’s somewhere very far away, possibly an off-Nexus world.”

An off-Nexus world? Was there anything outside the Nexus?

“You want me to find him,” Crag said. “Why now? Why didn’t I get this assignment years ago?”

“These things take time,” said the Tribune. “Paperwork, bureaucracy, crossworld permits and such. Suffice to say this is your time, Crag. We can’t wait any longer.”

“Why not?”

The Tribune shifted nervously in his big chair. Crag heard a slight grinding of gears beneath the pristine robes.

“You’ve never raised a child have you, Inspector?”

Crag’s heart pinged, its cogs slipping into a higher speed. “No, Excellency. We intended to but there were…complications.”

The main complication being that you sent my wife to prison.

“When your wife completes her sentence, do you intend to raise a child then?”

Crag stifled his anger. He hadn’t expected personal questions. They poked at old grudges, stirred up dangerous thoughts.

“I imagine so.”

“Good,” said the Tribune. “They say the greatest joy a man and woman can experience together is the raising of a healthy child. Not even the lowest Clatterpox would deny it. Now imagine that your sacred day comes. An Angel of the Potentates hovers above your domicile, then descends on its silver wings to gift you with the tiny bundle of joy that will be your son. Or daughter.”

Crag remembered watching the Waiting List for birthing dates. He and Caroline had been seven-hundred-and-ninth on the list. That was twenty-two years ago. If she hadn’t been taken away, it would have only been another year or two until the Angel brought them a baby to call their own. Crag had secretly hoped for a son, but he told Caroline he wanted a daughter too. Sometimes the Potentates gave a double blessing, and the Angels arrived with twins.

She would still want a child when she got out. It was part of who she was, part of why she was incarcerated in the first place. Helping a child shouldn’t ever be a crime, but she had ignored the law to do it. Maybe if they’d been given a legal baby before she stepped out of line, she wouldn’t have gotten into trouble that way. The whole subject made Crag uncomfortable.

“Imagine that your birthing day is set but your Angel never comes. Imagine getting a notice from the Ministere de Records that your child was lost–or stolen–before it could be delivered to you. You’ll have to go to the back of the line and wait your turn again. This scenario is happening more and more often, Crag. The Surgeon has become so skilled at robbing us of our property, he’s learned to intercept the Angels before they reach the Urbille. He’s also learned how to disable or destroy them, and to take the Organic babies for his own purposes. Now and again he still abducts older children, but more often these days he targets the Angels and takes the infants right out of their arms.”

Crag sat down on the front couch. There was a bigger picture here, something he was not yet seeing. The Angels travelled the Nexus rescuing newborns in the Outer Affinities, the Organic refuse of broken worlds delivered to a better life in the Urbille. Why would Wail want to interfere with the process? The children of the Urbille remained fully Organic until the time of their Conversion Day, when sixteen-year-olds gave up their flesh for the scientific ritual that made them either Beatific or Clatterpox.

A process that used to be Dr. Wail’s specialty.

Until the day he lost his mind…

“Now we come to the heart of the matter,” said the Tribune. “It is time to find Wail and put an end to his insurgence. Looking at the record of your accomplishments, your many commendations, and seeing the way you’ve handled this recent case, I’ve chosen you for this assignment.”

“I’m an Urbille operator,” Crag said. “I’ve never been out of the city. Never even been on the Thoroughfare.”

“There is a first time for everything, Inspector.”

“Policing the Nexus isn’t my job.” Arguing with the Tribune was a dangerous thing to do, but Crag’s anger was flowing again. A dull ache in his chest-cogs.

You shouldn’t have asked me about Caroline. Or babies.

“You’re a manhunter,” said the Tribune. “I’m giving you Special Dispensation with crossworld authorities to get this job done. Your jurisdiction is now expanded to the whole of the Nexus. If you need fresh ordinance, see the proper department. I’ll expect regular status reports. You may go.”

“I can’t do it,” Crag said. He didn’t move from the couch. They might throw him into the labyrinth like they had done to Caroline. But he figured they wouldn’t. Not now. The Tribune needed this case to close. For once Crag felt like he had an advantage over the powers he served. It felt good in a dangerous way.

“I see,” said the Tribune. His veiled head leaned forward. “You require an incentive. Very well, I’ll give you one. If you bring the Surgeon to justice, I’ll sign an executive order releasing your wife immediately. I believe she has served two decades and has three to go? I’ll wipe her slate clean, Crag. I have the Potentates’ direct authority on this matter.”

Crag said nothing. Tribune Anteus always had the Potentates’ direct authority.

“Do you understand? Bring me the Surgeon’s head, and I’ll give you back your wife. Or you can refuse the assignment and wait another thirty years to be with the woman you love.”

The coils tightened inside Crag’s stomach. His heartbeat was a steady clockwork rhythm that he rarely noticed. But heard it now, ticking, hurling echoes across the Tribune’s chamber. The Tribune did not seem to hear it at all.

Caroline.

He might be able to find the Surgeon. Everybody left clues. There was a lot to work with here. Part of him had always wanted to parse the Affinities. Finding the Surgeon would be the easy part. Bringing him down was something else entirely.

It’s Caroline.

“Consider it done,” Crag said.

Tribune Anteus clapped his hands, and his rings flashed as he signed Crag’s orders.

 

NEXT WEEK: “The StoneFathers”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 4

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SVETLANA

Welcome back!

Chapter 4 returns us to Svetlana, who crossed through a strange portal back in Chapter 1 and found herself in an alien desert. A big THANK YOU to everyone who’s reading and spreading the word.

In case you missed a chapter:

Chapter 1   Chapter 2   Chapter 3

A FEW ODD SOULS

Chapter 4.

The Apothecaries of Nil

At first she thought they were some kind of strange trees. They rustled and shambled in the distance like a pack of lazy spiders. It might have been the hot wind that moved them, but the wind had died down hours ago. The tiny white sun had set, but the big orange sun never changed its position. It blazed across a quarter of the crimson sky.

Svetlana had stripped the lining from her parka to make a scarf that covered head and shoulders. She had never known such heat, not even in the brief depths of summer on the tundra. She dripped sweat and staggered forward with a dry mouth, rationing the rest of her canteen water. She half-believed she would find Dima, but also half-believed she would die trying. If she did find him in this boiling hell, he would need water too. She would need to find more of it, or something else to drink.

Several times she considered going back. She fell to her knees on the seamless pavement where the blowing sand would not drift. She wept and wailed at the bloody sky. But going back was not really an option. The eelheads would kill her as she came through the gate. Even if she survived their torments, she’d have to live with abandoning little Dima.

You’re not going back.

Get up and follow that damned angel.

Follow him to Dima, or to death.

A mother’s fierce heart.

So she got up, that time and the next time. She prayed that dusk would fall and the red sky would fade to the cool touch of night. But night never came in this place. All three of the moons had set and risen again, but no darkness came. There was no night here, only a time when one bloated sun ruled the sky, and another even hotter time when the smaller sun rose to join it for awhile.

Her stomach growled and her throat was raw. She ignored the hunger like a wound, a pain in her gut for which she could do nothing. She walked the endless road and her skin turned to red then brown. Her body ached. There was no way to measure the passing of time since night and day had become meaningless concepts. She saw nothing alive here, no plants, not even the tiniest lizard. Nothing but sand, bare rock, and red sky, until she came upon the creatures.

Heedless of danger, drunk on heat and light, she stumbled closer to the trembling things. They were far taller than she imagined. If they were vegetable in nature, they might have fruit for her to eat. If they were some kind of animal, she might kill one of them and eat its flesh. She drew Takamoto’s blade and walked on, too exhausted for a cautious approach. They weren’t spiders at all, at least not earthly ones.

Their central bodies were like clusters of colossal grapes, a mass of fleshy ovoids hanging from a central stem, gathered into a “bunch” by clinging transparent membranes. From that central stalk rose nine segmented appendages, arcing into the air above the cluster-body, and swivelling downward at the third joint to impact the earth. These leg-like appendages formed a crude “cage” about each of the body-clusters. Each leg ended in a single talon long as a sword, and these talons clacked against the road or dug into the sand as the creatures walked.

The color of their flesh ranged from black to purple to lavender with veins of white, and their strangely pleasant odor blew on the wind. Svetlana inhaled it and came close enough to walk beneath the nearest of the creatures, who seemed entirely unconcerned with her presence. The point of her blade dug a furrow in the sand beside her; she couldn’t find the strength to raise it.

She examined the crab-like legs as she walked between them. One of the creatures swiveled its many eyes at her. They blinked violet and gleaming from the body-cluster, two eyes set in each of the hanging ovoids. She fell to her knees again, not because of the high-pitched garbling of the creature, although it pierced her ears like a siren. What forced her to the ground, humbled her with impossibility, was its cluster of faces.

The creature’s central body was composed of a dozen or more suspended ovoids, each one with its own two eyes, nose, and mouth. They were human faces, some of them bloated and stretched, while others hung limp and drooling. Some of its faces were beautiful in their androgynous simplicity. Others were rotten and half-decayed. A horrible cluster of heads, most of them warbling something vital and unintelligible.

A warning? A greeting? Svetlana couldn’t begin to say.

Other clusters of heads regarded her from outside the cage of legs into which she’d stumbled. She lay on the sand now, directly below the hanging cluster of heads.

Now these things will kill me, and it will be over.

I tried, Dima. Forgive me.

In the cool shadow of the creature’s body, the only shade she found since coming through the gateway, she fell unconscious. An instant later, or perhaps many hours, the chill of liquid on her lips awoke her like a shockwave. It sluiced into her mouth and overspilled her cheeks. Cold, pure water. She drank it down, deeply and greedily, until her stomach felt bloated and her head ached. She wiped the excess over her face and hair, and her vision cleared.

One of the cluster-headed beings kneeled beside her on seven folded legs. Its last two appendages were what passed for arms. They rose from the central stalk like the other seven legs, but were contracted now to half their length, drawing into the central stalk. Among the glistening heads staring at her from the creature’s mid-body, there were three that seemed entirely human. She avoided looking at the decayed heads and the distorted ones. Perhaps some of the thing’s heads were dying, rotten fruits clinging to the vine. Three pairs of healthy eyes started at Svetlana while the pointed arms poured water from a glass orb. The three heads spoke simultaneously, and she could not understand the language. It sounded like the singing of insects, but much louder.

Svetlana checked her body. She lay unmolested next to the kindly being, her sword left on the sand a short distance away. The rest of the head-cluster beings milled about nearby, as if waiting for Svetlana’s caretaker to give a sign. Surely they wouldn’t give her water if they intended to kill her. Yet there were worse fates than death.

The being’s dual appendages sat down the glass globe and reached above its main stalk where a bundle of provisions sat tied with strands of rope. The creature’s arms found what they were looking for: a tall glass vial of murky liquid. It clanked against several other glass containers as the being removed it from the rope-net above its head-cluster.

It offered the vial to Svetlana with a few blithering words, and several pair of blinking eyes. One of the side heads vomited an orange mucous, but the three pleasant faces smiled at her. Their eyes were orbs of gleaming purple, and their lips were that same shade. None of the heads had any hair, since they were connected to the other heads by shared membranes where a human might grow healthy locks.

Svetlana touched the vial. She had been dragged from the road proper to the camp of the head-cluster beings. The razory tip of an appendange came forward and punctured the big cork that sealed the vial. It pulled the cork free with a popping sound, and motioned for her to drink.

She sniffed at the mouth of the bottle. A sour-sweet stench. Definitely not water. But they had shared their water with her already. Why do that if they were only going to poison her? She blinked at the three smiling heads, tried to ignore the rotting skulls higher up on the beast’s cluster-body, and tipped the vial above her lips.

It burned going down, and she coughed some of it back up. The creature took the bottle immediately, deftly re-stoppering and re-storing it. Svetlana writhed and spat and cursed in the dirt beside the road. The heat expanded from her tongue to her fingertips, then from her belly to her brain, and her vision swelled with colors she could not name. She gnashed her teeth and wretched, but there was no food in her stomach to throw up.

The world turned to a mess of hot blurs, and she feared the drink had blinded her. She’d heard stories of the eelheads blinding men to make them more docile slaves. The roaring in her ears finally ceased, and her eyes regained their sight. She blinked at the many-headed creature.

“…not specifically an elixir of telepathy, but one of understanding. A liquid-form course in celestial linguistics, if you will. It should be working by now.” She realized a voice was addressing her with words that actually made sense. Of the three handsome heads that hung near her, the closest two were speaking with simultaneous words. “Are you feeling better?”

Svetlana spoke by instinct, in her own language.

“Yes,” she said. “You gave me water…and something else.” The expressions on the faces told her that they understood her, and now she understood their sing-song insect language.

“Of course,” said the double voice. “The Elixir of Understanding. We always bring a bottle of it along on these trips. You never know who you’ll meet while parsing the Affinities.”

Svetlana forced herself to stand on aching legs. She was tall enough to look the heads in their eyes while the creature was kneeling. “What is this place?” she said. “Who are you? Have you seen the Faceless Angel?”

The three handsome heads frowned, while the creature’s other heads grimaced.

“So many questions. Your first time on the Thoroughfare, we presume?”

“The what?”

“The Thoroughfare,” said the creature. Its two arm appendages spread themselves to indicate the broad stone highway winding among the dunes. “The road between the worlds. Are you here by mistake? Are you looking for a way home?”

Svetlana picked up Takamoto’s blade, wiped it clean of sand, and sheathed it on her back.

“No,” she said. “I’m here for a reason.”

The heads rolled their eyes in various directions.

“Forgive our impertinence,” said the two speaking heads. “This cluster is Gehosopha, and these are my brothers. We are of the Solbred, Composite Beings whose lineage can be traced back to the 42nd Caliphate of the Solarion Empire. We are descended from this world’s native inhabitants.”

Svetlana blinked. Her head still swam from the language elixir. What else had it done to her?

“Geho–Geho–”

“Gehosopha.”

“Svetlana.”

“We are honored to make your acquaintence,” said Gehosopha, in two voices at once. “Do you walk the celestial road alone?”

Svetlana stopped herself. She wanted to tell this alien the truth. It had saved her life. It could be an ally. In this land of death, this meeting could mean life for her and Dima. But something wouldn’t let her blurt out the fact that she was looking for her son. She wasn’t even sure should could say those words without weeping.

“I’m hunting the Faceless Angel,” she said. “It took something that belongs to me.”

The clustered heads blinked and drooled and trembled.

“Have you seen it?” Svetalana asked. She described it as best she could: The shimmering silver skin, the glittering wings. There could be no mistaking it.

“We see many things along the Thoroughfare,” said Gehosopha. “Some of them possess wings as you describe. Some have silvery skin, as you also describe. Yet it has been many revolutions since we saw such things. We have little more to say about the matter. We are sorry that we cannot be more to help you.”

“Maybe you can,” Svetlana said. She looked in the direction from which she had come, then stared the other way along the Thoroughfare. It seemed identical. Kilometer after kilometer of red desert, and this road flowing through it. A dry riverbed ran perpendicular to the road. She saw the tracks left by the Composite Beings as they had scuttled along the riverbed toward the Thoroughfare.

“Where does this road lead? Maybe I can find the angel there.”

“In this direction lies the ruins of Nil.” Gehosopha waved an appendange in the direction Svetlana was going. “Where the Great Apothecaries work their alchemies.” He waved his talon in the direction from which Svetlana had come. “In this direction lies the Unknown. The way of it is forbidden to us.”

“That way lies my world,” Svetlana said. “The eelheads have conquered it.”

“What are eelheads?”

“Very unpleasant beings. You don’t want to go there.”

The cluster of heads nodded as one. “It is forbidden to us. Yet you come from this place where we dare not go. Should we fear you?”

Svetlana almost laughed. Any one of these creatures could stomp her to death, impale her on its spear-like forelegs. Yet Gehosopha was the one worried about danger. These were gentle beings, despite their grotesque bodies and clusters of heads. The faces were so humanlike that perhaps the ancestors of these Solbred were true humans. Perhaps at some point in their history they joined physical forms to ensure their survival, thus creating these Composite Beings.

“Only those who keep me from the Faceless Angel need fear me,” she said.

Gehosopha hummed and clicked his appendages together. “We will not ask what this angel has taken from you.” It blinked at her with six concerned eyes, as if each head already knew the answer. The rest of its heads hung limp and disinterested.

“Can you help me?” she asked.

Gehosopha rose to his full height and scuttled over to his fellows. They consulted in a rush of words too fast for Svetlana to follow. When Gehosopha came back to her, his three main heads were smiling. She wondered if the rotting heads would fall off someday, like dead leaves from a tree. She recalled similar skulls lying half-buried in the sand on either side of the road.

“It is likely that those who do business with the Apothecaries of Nil have seen this angel you are seeking,” Gehosopha said. “You are welcome to walk among us, Svetlana. We would like to hear more about your world, and you may find answers to your questions when we reach our destination. You carry weapons, so we offer you the position of sentinel to our caravan. The road has its dangers, and we abhor violence. We will pay you in water, food, and knowledge.”

Svetlana picked up the watering orb that Gehosopha had been using to revive her. She drank more of the cool water. The container was still mostly full and bigger round than her head. The crimson heat no longer felt so oppressive, and the water felt good in her belly.

“You have already given me water and knowledge,” she said. “What do you have in the way of food?”

She did not ask what the “dangers” of the road were.

It could not have mattered.

####

Svetlana saw the smokes of Nil well before she saw the settlement. It used to be a magnificent metropolis of domes and spires, but that was obviously a long time ago. Now it was just another dead city, built in some lost age by artisans with supreme skill at beautifying stone. The fragmented towers gleamed in seventeen colors bright as mirrors. The broken domes were large enough to house mountains. The pointed shards of their roofs reflected sunlight in various shades of orange.

The smokes came from a smaller and far more practical settlement built directly in the center of the great ruin. While millions of souls lived here in splendor long ago, only a fraction of that number remained. A great wall once stood about the city, but it lay now in piles of rubble between the Lesser Gates. Twenty such gates admitted traffic from trails and tracks runing to Nil from the broad desert. One of these gates served the Thoroughfare, and the Composite Beings were not the first arrivals today.

Svetlana had rested with the Solbred for several hours before beginning the journey to Nil. Their thrice-yearly custom, according to Gehosopha, was to travel in a sacred hyep, a group of exactly eighteen members, across the red waste, camping at the road between the worlds and then following it to Nil. There they traded outer-desert goods and gemstones for the miraculous drugs of the Apothecaries.

The Solbred didn’t speak much on the road. They walked like great spiders surrounding Svetlana. She kept to the middle of the road, although she would have taken the point. Gehosopha insisted she walk at their middle, amid by a forest of spear-like legs and pendulous head-clusters. She soon understood why they spoke little while traveling: Their heads tended to swing back and forth. Only a few heads kept their eyes open while the rest closed their eyes to avoid dizziness. The heads hanging highest to the top of the central stalk swayed the least, so they tended to be the eyes used for walking.

Svetlana wasn’t sure if she were guarding the Composite Beings, or if they were guarding her. If anything came to threaten the caravan, it would have to attack the Solbred first. Svetlana could run from the forest of legs quickly, but not as fast as the Composite Beings could scuttle away from her–leaving her face to face with whatever might threaten them. She had no idea what form such a threat might take, as Gehosopha had dismissed any knowledge of eelheads. Of course, the Solbred might know them by another name, but if so the Elixir of Understanding should have translated it like everything else. Perhaps the Solbred had never invaded this world. At least not yet.

Drinking the sour-sweet elixir had changed more than her understanding of language. She understood the Solbred now, having slept in the desert alongside their resting forms. While she slept, she heard their thoughts and saw their dreams. She knew the images were not from her own imagination; she could not have imagined such a grotesque story. She knew the ancient history of the Solbred now, from the time before they were Composite Beings, to the Era of Unification, where their physical forms were joined by harnessed universal forces. Their Great Migration to find a world where they could prosper had brought them here. They called it Shyn Myah, and they settled along its great red desert in fertile river basins. They had built fantastic cities like Nil, mingled with races from the stars, visitors to this world who often settled here as well. The Solbred empire had been a vast and diverse cosmic menagerie of form and color, shape and density, a myriad of organic and semi-organic species.

There was little left of the Solbred Empire now. A few scattered settlements of centuries-old Composite Beings. They spent most of their time philosophizing, gardening, dancing, and enjoying the vast array of drugs provided by the Apothecaries of Nil. This tri-annual pilgramage would restore the supplies of Gehosopha’s community and maintain his family’s wealth.

Something else she learned from the elixir, but did not quite understand. The Solbred worshipped the wild stones of the desert. Every rock or crag among the sands was sacred to the Composite Beings, as was the stone road itself. Svetlana could not wrap her mind about the bizarre logic of this belief. Recognizing this belief was not the same as feeling the passion of the belief itself. Some of Svetlana’s people had worshipped a god, or gods, but it had never saved them from bandits or maurading eelheads. She did not understand this Solbred reverence for anything made of stone. This lack of understanding in an otherwise vast pool of awareness reminded her that she was only human. The Composite Beings were not, even though their distant ancestors surely had been.

The Thoroughfare was a holy path to the Solbred. A sacred route to the drugs their people craved. Svetlana knew of drugs could cure the sick. Her people had found them sometimes in the depths of ruined cities. Sometimes they were poison, other times they saved lives. After drinking the Elixir of Understanding, her conception of drugs and medicine had also expanded. She knew that the Apothecaries of Nil brewed the most wonderful and potent drugs in twelve realities. Another blank spot in her new awareness: How many were realities were there? At least twelve, as the Solbred understood it.

Most of all she understood that she was in another world entirely. There was no tundra here, no Omiska, no Kirishni, or any of the places she knew. She’d felt it in her guts when she first came through the gateway, and now she knew it for a fact. This was not her world. This confirmation did not impact her motivation. Dima’s abductor had come through this place. She would cross a thousand worlds to find him. She hoped the folk of Nil would know more about the angel.

The pale stone of the Thoroughfare ran directly through the heart of Nil, but travelers were made to stop at a pile of ruins that used to be a gate wall. Guards prowled the site with spear-gun rifles. They looked like huge desert lizards that had learned to walk upright. Dark laquered metal had been forged to fit their serpentine bodies. Spiked helmets obscured their slitted snake-eyes with visors of black glass.

The crowd at the guard post consisted of twenty-four gnarled, green-skinned creatures like something out of a child’s tale. The word goblins came to mind. The elixir again, still making connections in her consciousness. Apparently these goblinoids had been stopped and searched after offending the lizard-men guards on some point of otherworld ettiquete. Gehosopha explained this to Svetlana as another member of his hyep secured passage by dropping a bright stone into a guard’s palm. The reptoids waved the Composite Beings onward. The goblins squealed and cursed as their packs, their silver-chaised war vests, and their canvas bags were picked through by the reptoids.

“It pays to have connections,” said Gehosopha. “And money.” The hyep lumbered its way past the noisy scene. Svetlana was glad to leave behind the reek of unwashed goblin-flesh.

The great stone road ran directly through the ancient piles of ruin. The great bazaar steamed and roared directly ahead. It stood at the center of the ruins, the heart of the rising smokes, vapors, and auroras that filled the sky. Crowds of odd beings walked, worked, and bartered here. Wheeled carriages drawn by feline beasts rumbled about the corners, making pedestrians scurry.

A swirling music drifted on the wind. The endless smells of Nil were like a thousand epiphanies crowding the brain via the nostril pathways. Svetlana almost fainted, but Gehosopha propped her up. “Only a bit farther,” he said. “Then we’ll find a respite.” Svetlana enjoyed the change in mood created by the mingling of lights, sounds, and fogs. The desert had burned her numb. Now the cool breeze of the city and the shifting colors rekindled her fascination. She felt like a little girl walking in a dream of colors.

Her eyes swept the alien crowds for winged figures. Most of the beings here were humanoid in shape, or semi-humanoid at least. Yet there were no true humans. There were more races and species than she could easily count. These were the remnants of the great Solbred Empire, which had crumbled ages ago. A diverse array of biological remnants.

Barrel-bodied beings traded shells with talking worms. In the next booth an eight-armed man hawked metal trinkets. Muscular men with the legs of hairy goats carried tridents of brass and silver. They quaffed mugs of foamy ale and laughed at unknown jokes. There were beasts whose true form could not be seen, as only their bulky heads rose above the piles of silks and furs that hid their bodies. A population of white-furred, six-armed apelings lithe as cats swung from cornice, streetlamp, and roof gardens.

Frog-headed shamblers traded kisses with blossoming plant-folk. Six or seven times Svetlana spotted something that looked somewhat human but was not. Helmets, masks, and hoods were common in the bazaar. If there were any humans here at all, she would not recognize them. She obviously did not belong in this place, but the population of oddities paid her no mind.

At the center of Nil, dominating the inner third of the bazaar, stood the Salons of the Apothecaries. This area was far less crowded and far better guarded. Armored reptoids stood on every corner, and the symbol of the Apothecaries flew above them, an abstract design of red and black threads. A wealthier class of shopper walked these streets, entering and exiting the salons one at a time, leaving with bags, boxes, barrels, or wagonloads of product. The hyep of Solbreds dominated a narrow street as they approached the broad window of a shop painted with an alien langage. Svetlana found that she knew these symbols. The elixir’s effect on her was still active, but she had no control over what she understood and did not understand. Gehosopha had told her the elixir’s effects were permanent, though its intensity would gradually fade.

PEPPER DOMO’S ALCHEMICAL SOLUTIONS read the sign. The Solbreds engaged in a simultaneous chanting that drew stares from passing shoppers. Svetlana waited for them to stop and tell her what came next. Across the street a juggler in a gaudy cape looked partially human, yet his face was missing. Two eye-stalks grew out of his oval-shaped head, blinking with green phosphoresence. He juggled a plethora of knives with his human-like hands. Svetlana watched the steel sparkle in an endless loop above the juggler’s palms, waiting for him to stop. He did not. Someone dropped a coin into the hat sitting at the performer’s feet.

The Composite Beings stopped their chanting, and Gehosopha stepped forward. “This cluster is to be the Procurer,” he said. “We must negotiate with Pepper Domo. This cluster’s brethren will secure lodging while we do business. Will you accompany me, sentinel?”

Svetlana nodded. Each of the Apothecary Salons was a great, squat tower of white stone that gleamed like mother-of-pearl. They were not ancient structures, but were built with obvious skill and integrity sometime well after the fall of greater Nil. Svetlana noticed lizard-guards stationed at the door and on the roof of each Salon. A single round window on each side of the pentagonal towers meant that most of the rooms inside had no windows. Probably storehouses for all the drugs made by the alchemists.

Her belly growled. The Solbred had fed her a pouchful of tasteless gruel when she had begun the journey. It gave her energy but did not cure her hunger. She had allowed herself a tiny bit of dried fruit from her satchel. Now the smells of cooking and spices wafting from streets and windows made her ravenous. Later she would have to find proper food. Right now her hunger for knowledge took precedence.

She followed Gehosopha through the double door of the Salon. Inside was a wonderland of glass, crystal, and bubbling fluids of every color. Shelves were labeled and loaded with glass vials featuring concoctions, elixirs, potions, oils, balms, liquors, philtres, solutions, medicines. The showroom was only part of a vast laboratory that extended across the ground-level chamber. At stations along the walls, more of the eye-stalk people took orders from a diverse array of clients. Like the juggler outside, the eye-stalk folk exhibited startling dexterity and sleight of hand, grabbing vials, bottles, and jars from the shelves as quickly as they could and securing them in paper packaging with astonishing skill.

The smells in the shop were acidic and faintly sulfuric, which dispelled Svetlana’s hunger pangs. She accompanied Gehosopha to a broad station at the back of the shop, where a space was designated for larger folk like the Composite Beings. Her companion exchanged a few quick words with the eye-stalk at the counter, and he disappeared. Moments later another eye-stalk man replaced him, this one dressed in gray with a necklace of amber and rubies.

“Blessed Stones!” said the newcomer, spreading his arms in welcome. “Gehosopha Solbred, so good to see you again.” He reached out both hands to grasp the talon of Gehosopha’s right arm-appendage. His ovoid head bowed, and his eye-stalks swivelled to stare at Svetlana. Only then did she notice his lipless mouth, a vertical slash centered in the lower half of the smooth head. So these people weren’t exactly faceless. Not like the Faceless Angel, who had no eyes, nose, or mouth.

“Greetings and Good Health to you, Domo,” said the Composite Being. “This is the sentinel of our hyep. She is called Svetlana.”

Pepper Domo offered Svetlana his hand, as any human man might do. She forced a smile and shook his hand. She tried and failed to get fix on his twin eyeballs as they rotated atop the jointed stalks, scanning her from head to toe.

“What have you brought me?” Domo said. “A slave from the backwater provinces? She’s thin but not uncomely.”

Svetlana drew her hand away too quickly. Domo’s green eyes stared at her.

Gehosopha laughed. “You know we never take slaves,” he said. “Evil business.”

“You have slaves in Nil?” Svetlana asked.

She looked at Gehosopha instead of Domo.

“Not human slaves,” Gehosopha said.

“Does it matter if they’re human or not?” Svetlana said. She dared not think of Dima thrown into slavery. Death might be preferable to such a fate. But if her son was made a slave, at least he would be alive so she could find him. He must be alive. She would accept no other outcome. Dima was alive and she would find him.

Domo and Gehosopha looked at each other: A cluster of hanging heads, some with idiotic blankness, others full of polite mirth, the dead ones hanging in black and purple silence, staring at a pair of blinking, shifting eyestalks. The two beings burst into simultaneous laughter, something else Svetlana did not understand. Why her question should elicit humor, she could not say. She decided to let Gehosopha do the talking.

“I have prepared your customary seasonals,” Domo told Gehosopha. “You will see that all is in order.” He produced a ledger from behind the counter and pointed to row after row of quill-scribed figures with notations.

“This cluster has no doubt,” said the Composite Being. “We must negotiate.”

“Yes, of course!” said Domo. “Save it for dinner, my friend. I have prepared a meal of surpassing succulence for you, my most loyal of clients. I’ve also obtained some of that Andromedan wine you love so much.”

The Composite Being trembled with expectation, many of its faces rolling their eyes in delight, mouths twisted into tiny o-shapes or bright-toothed smiles. “This cluster would like to bring Svetlana along if you don’t mind. She has an urgent calling and could use your advice.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Domo. He led his guests from the showroom down a set of stairs into a sunken grotto filled with piled cushions, silken curtains, and small tables loaded with food and drink. Crystal goblets and glass decanters were filled with sparkling beverages. Golden platters were overloaded with steaming meats, roasted vegetables, and strange things that Svetlana could not identify. It all smelled terrific, even the crocks full of squirming white puffworms.

Domo settled himself cross-legged on the cushions before a table, and his guests followed his example. Gehosopha bent his seven legs, resting on the cushions between Svetlana and Domo. Svetlana could no longer resist the call of hunger, and while her companions spoke of prices, bulk discounts, and the like, she devoured the delicious carcass of something like a wild turkey. The dish lead her to several others, and everything she tried was edible. She managed to avoid the hairy worms, although Gehosopha couldn’t seem to get anough of them. The Composite Being shoved them into his many mouths, skewering six at a time with an arm-talon.

The sparkling green liquid that Domo called “wine” did not taste like any spirit of Svetlana’s homework. It burned and soothed at the same time, sizzled going down, and sent waves of pleasure throughout her body. Immediately she drank too much of it and had to stop mid-meal. But she rallied and ate another heap of tasty strangeness.

Domo was an expert at making Gehosopha laugh during course after course, but Svetlana did not catch most of the humor. The Composite Being said little, but its living heads chuckled, guffawed, or cackled as the dinner proceeded. The dead heads remained quiet, hanging like wilted fruits slowly turning into crusted skulls. Pepper and Domo drained three bottles of Andromedan between them before the last course was done.

By the time they got around to Svetlana’s problem, she was half asleep on the cushions. The voices of other tables in shrouded corners of the room became a lilting melody. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Despite her understanding of every language she heard, she lacked the context to make out any great meaning in these conversations. Gehosopha giggled and gave her a cup of something warm and blue. The hot liquid woke her up as Gehosopha finalized business terms with Domo.

Now they both looked at her, and she knew it was her time.

“Svetlana has asked me questions that I cannot answer,” said Gehosopha. “I spoke to her of the Apothecaries’ great wisdom. Now I must be silent that she may ask your favor.” The Composite Being waved a talon to cue her, but she didn’t need his signal. She stared at an invisible point directly between Domo’s hovering eyeballs.

“The Faceless Angel,” she said. “Do you know it?”

Domo smiled vertically and his eyes narrowed on the ends of their stalks. “I suspect that what you call an angel, my people know as a Silverwing.”

Svetlana described the Faceless Angel.

“Yes,” said Domo. “Gleaming silver skin, feathered wings white as ivory, I have seen them. Extraordinarly beautiful creatures.”

“There is more than one?” she asked. “What are they?”

“These are questions I cannot answer,” said Domo. “Many times I have seen them flying over Nil. Only one at a time, and many years apart. Always following the route of the road between the worlds, yet they fly in both directions. I first saw one of them while I was travelling to Spirix with my grandfather’s caravan. He called them Harvesters, though we do not use that word anymore. He would say very little about them.”

Svetlana sipped the warm liquid. It calmed her. Anger simmered in her gut. Surely there must be more. How many of these things existed? Did they all come from the same place? Or places?

“I can tell you one thing for certain,” Domo said. “They fly between the worlds. Otherwise they would not follow the Thoroughfare. Beyond that I cannot say. Perhaps they are the agents of some higher power. Perhaps even Aphelion itself.”

“Aphelion?”

“An ancient legend,” Gehosopha broke in with his double-voice. “A city of immense wisdom and light. The city upon which all other cities were patterned, according to various belief systems.”

Domo huffed. “Aphelion is not just a legend.”

“Oh, really?” said the Composite Being. “Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Do you known anyone who has been to Aphelion?” said Gehosopha. “Seen any trinkets from its markets, or even heard anyone who speaks its language?”

“No, but I’ve heard many stories…”

“I have no time for stories,” Svetlana said. “I need to find these Silverwings–these Harvesters. I need to find the one that took my…”

Domo dropped his eyes. Gehosopha said nothing.

A silence fell across the table. Nearby a slug-like alien inhaled smoke from a giant water-pipe, passing it around his table to an assortment of eye-stalk men.

“I know one more story of the Silverwings,” said the Apothecary. His eye-stalks swivelled toward Svetlana, and he scooted closer on the cushions. The jewels on his chest gleamed in the light of candles.

“My grandmother said one of them stole a child from a woman in her village. She died many cycles ago, but she told me this story several times. Before my family came to Nil and learned the ways of the Apothecary, we lived in the eastern lands. In those days the ancient bloodlines sometimes manifested in genetic throwbacks to simpler times. A week after my grandmother’s eleventh birthday, a babe was born in her village that resembled the Old Blood tribes, those who lived here before the Time of Modifications. The Old Blood looked…well, they looked like you. Homo sapiens terra.”

Domo pointed at Svetlana with a lean grey finger.

“This baby was considered a freak, but it would have been raised by the village anyway. Several Old Blood types were born every generation. But this one was stolen. Plucked from its crib by the hands of a Silverwing who flew out of the sky. My grandfather said the Harvesters used to come more often, in the time before the Great Modifications. Although he would never say it, I believe they once harvested life itself. Which is to say that they were stealing babies from the Old Blood tribes. Apparently they still do. The Silverwing took your child.”

Svetlana’s eyes welled and tears crept down her cheeks. She did not bother to wipe them. “You tell me they’re real,” she said. “That they’re child-stealers. These are things I already know. But can you tell me where to find them?”

The eye-stalk man looked especially sad, and his eyeballs drooped. Gehosopha let out a long sigh from several of his heads at once.

“I wish that I could,” said Domo. “No mother should lose her child.”

“I have to go,” Svetlana stood up. Her head swam and she did not want to weep in this quiet place, or to show the weakness of her heart to these strange people. Grief swelled like poison in her chest. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves.

“Wait,” said Domo. “Perhaps I can help you.”

She faced him, but refused to sit down again.

“I do not know everything, as you can see,” said Domo. “But I am an Apothecary of Nil, and I know where to find information. Our tinctures and serums are made from the rarest and most precious of ingredients. We are masters of knowing where to look for what we need. There is a place where you can find memories far longer than that of my people, a place where you might find better answers.”

Svetlana crossed her arms. The tears burned on her cheek. She waited for Domo to finish his thought. He raised a goblet in one hand and drank first.

“The Lords of Creep City are ancient and wise,” he said. “They know many things that have been long forgotten. Their knowledge of the worlds along the Nexus is great. While they lived long ago, they were constant travellers between the Affinities. They even travelled to the ancient Urbille at the center of the Nexus. Thousands of cycles ago they died, preserving their bodies and minds with mystic science. They know more than my people have ever known. It is said they know all the mysteries of Time and Space.”

Svetlana had never seen a mummy, but thanks to the Elixir of Understanding she knew the word. Wise mummies. How wise could the dead be? Takamoto would have laughed at this question. It would have tickled his dark sense of humor. His people had believed in the sanctity and wisdom of the dead.

“Where is this Creep City?” she said.

Domo spread the fingers of his big, flat hands.

“Not too terribly far from here,” he said, “along the road between the worlds.”

Svetlana wiped at her cheeks.

“This cluster may not leave its homeworld,” said Gehosopha. “The Solbred depend on us to return with the seasonal psychoactives.”

“I will go alone then,” Svetlana said.

“It just so happens that I’m about to parse the Affinities myself,” said Domo. “An expedition to service important clientele in premium locations along the Nexus. Why don’t you sign a contract with me instead of these honorable Solbred?”

“There was no contract signed between us,” said Gehosopha. “We reached a verbal agreement, from which Svetlana is now free.”

“Somebody explain to me what’s happening,” Svetlana said. Her head swam with new ideas, possibilities, contradictions, and all of them holding back a flood of emotions that threatened to destroy her.

“You’ve proven yourself a worthy bodyguard for Gehosopha’s people,” said Domo, waving his eyeballs at her. “Now come work for me. I’m going to Creep City.”

Svetlana grimaced. “Proven myself? There were no threats to the Solbred on the road. I faced no bandits or other enemies.” She sat down on the pile of cushions with an exhausted sound.

“No bandits or enemies?” Domo repeated her words. “Well, that sounds like you did the job exceptionally well. Wouldn’t you say so, Gehosopha?”

The Composite Being smiled and its many heads nodded.

“Come, then,” said Pepper Domo. “Join my payroll. I can use someone with your courage, not to mention your sword and pistol. The Thoroughfare offers many dangers.”

“So I have heard,” Svetlana said. She recalled the half-starved oracle in her cave. The tribute she brought for the old crone had led her to the Gateway of the Angel. These mummy lords were simply another Oracle to consult. Here was something she could understand. She would have to find and deliver a tribute worthy of such Oracles. There would be plenty of time to do this on the road between the worlds.

“Fine,” she said. “Let’s go to Creep City.”

It was her only chance. Dima’s only chance.

Domo practically squealed with excitement. His arms danced in exaggerated movements and his eye-stalks writhed like tiny serpents. His slit of a mouth barely moved. He refilled their cups with sparkling Andromedan.

“And so we shall,” Domo said. “Tomorrow.”

He raised a glass.

“But today let’s get nicely drunk.”

 

NEXT WEEK: “Special Dispensation”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 3

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HARMONA

Why release Chapter 3 so early?

Because I can.

I make the rules here, not some distant publishing company. That’s the whole point of this experiment. And it feels gooood.

I also wanted to get the first three chapters out as soon as possible, so that readers can meet all three main characters. Their separate narratives entwine as the book goes on, but we’ll keep visiting Svetlana, Crag, and Harmona individually until fate brings them together. (No spoilers, dude!) Chapter 3 introduces Harmona and the New Organics. 

A big THANK YOU to everyone who’s reading and spreading the word.

In case you missed a chapter: Chapter 1    Chapter 2

 

A FEW ODD SOULS

Chapter 3.

HearthHome

 

The world was green and good. Harmona watched the sun rise from the top of the Hearthtower. The stone beneath her bare feet grew warmer in the first light of day. The last hint of night faded from the sky and clouds rolled above the worldforest.

The tower’s top was flat and entirely seamless. Its diameter was wide enough to hold a hundred or more people, but nobody had followed Harmona up here this morning yet. She relished these rare moments of quietude, when the ony sounds came from the great flocks of birds soaring above the trees. This was the only place where she could look across the treetops, a green ocean of leaf and palm that blanketed the continent as far as she could see.

Ten years living on Gaeya and her people had yet to locate the edges of the great woodland or the farthest shores of the continent. She knew there was an actual ocean out there somewhere, a place where mighty rivers emptied themselves and solid land gave way to the chaos of open waters. Some enterprising wanderer of a future generation would discover it. She was content to stay here at the heart of the green world, to watch the sun rise above the pinnacle of HearthHome.

The morning wind tossed the curls of her hair and whipped the mothsilk gown about her legs. She inhaled the fragrance of a million blossoms on the breeze, the comforting scents of leaf and bark, and beneath it the everpresent musk of raw earth. Somewhere under that canopy of endless green, Dorian and his band of hunters were on their way back home.

Ten years ago she would never have imagined him as an archer, a huntsman, a wood-roaming champion of his people. Yet back then she would have never imagined herself standing atop this tower and staring at a new world of bounty and freedom. She raised her hands to catch a ray of sunlight, like picking fruit from a low branch. The golden light played across her knuckles, her upturned palms, the pale brown skin of her forearms. These simple pleasures would have remained unknown to her if she had not come here.

Gratitude swelled like a raw flame in her breast, ready to burst from her skin like sunbeams. The wind caressed her face. She hoped Dorian would return soon. It had been six days since she felt his warm skin against her own. She trembled, anticipating the heat of his lips, the strength of his arms wrapped about her waist.

“Mother!”

Harmona turned to meet her daughters as they topped the spiral stairwell from the tower’s uppermost chamber. Elodie, her youngest, had been the first to call out. Harmona couldn’t quite believe that six years had already passed since Elodie’s birth. Astrid and Sabine, Elodie’s eight- and nine-year old sisters, followed her onto the tower-top, grinning into the wind. Elodie blinked into the glaring sunlight as she leaped into her mother’s arms. All three girls still wore their sleeping gowns. Like Harmona, they hadn’t bothered to change before coming up to enjoy the dawn.

They stood together along the short circular wall that enclosed the roof. Harmona lifted Elodie so she could see over the edge.

“See how green the world is,” Harmona said. She brushed Elodie’s hair back from her round face.

“The sun hurts my eyes,” Elodie said. She buried her face in Harmona’s neck.

“You can’t look directly at it,” Astrid said. “You’ll go blind.”

Harmona smiled and rubbed Astrid’s head.

“Who told you that?” she said.

“Father,” said Astrid. “When he took us to the Sacred Grove.”

“Is it true?” Sabine asked. She was the skeptic of the bunch. Wise beyond her years. The firstborn and the first to question what was given or said to her.

“Yes,” said Harmona. “The sun is made of fire. If you touch a hearth fire your hand will burn. The sun will burn your eyes. Yet without it we’d all be stuck in darkness.”

“No we wouldn’t,” Sabine said.

Astrid gave her a dirty look. “Why not?”

“Because of the moons,” Sabine explained. “Six moons greater and lesser to light our way through the darkness.”

Harmona smiled. Sabine had learned well from her tutors.

“Can you name all six moons?”

Sabine rolled the names off her tongue rapidly. Astrid joined in with the names of the last two, mimicking her sister.

“The sun also gives us heat and warmth,” Sabine said. “There are six moons, but the nights are cold. Why don’t the moons give us warmth, Mother?”

Harmona pinched her eldest daughter’s cheek. “You are full of questions,” she said. “The moons only reflect the sun’s fire. They are bright but cold.”

“What are the moons made of?” Astrid asked.

“Stone,” Harmona said.

“Like HearthHome,” said Elodie.

Harmona kissed her daughter’s forehead. “That’s right, precious girl.”

Mother and daughters stared across the green world for a moment. A flock of white birds reflected the sun’s gold from their plumage.

“Tell us about the place you came from,” Sabine asked. “You never talk about it.”

Harmona frowned. Sabine’s curiosity went hand-in-hand with her intelligence. She cherished this quality in her oldest, but sometimes it made for difficult moments.

“It was an old world,” she said. “Nothing like this one. It was dark and grey. Cold.”

“Were there six moons?”

“No,” Harmona said. “Only one.”

“The nights must have been dark there.”

“Yes,” Harmona said. “Very dark.”

“Tell us more,” Astrid said.

Harmona sat Elodie down at her feet. “Your father is better at telling tales than I am. He’ll be home in a day or two. You can ask him these questions.”

Sabine sighed. She was used to her mother’s avoidance of this topic. Dorian had a way of explaining things to his girls that softened the cruelty of the past. He turned everything into a lesson or an entertaining story. When Harmona thought of their life before Gaeya, she felt like weeping. She didn’t want the girls to see her like that.

“Father’s coming home?” Elodie asked. She jumped and ran around the rooftop, shouting her joy to the wind. Children had no filters for their emotions. Already Harmona felt the shadow of Sabine’s question fading. She smiled and embraced her two eldest.

“Let’s go down to breakfast,” she said. “We’ll have honey and wheat-toast, and there’s loamberries and wingfruit fresh from the gardens.”

“I’m hungry!” Astrid said. Sabine reluctantly agreed to receiving nourishment over knowledge. The girls followed their mother down the spiral stair into the suite of bedchambers that served as home to the HearthMother. They changed into soft tunics of plant fiber dyed to colors of earth, leaf, and sky, set with golden trim at sleeves and hem. Each daughter presented herself and passed inspection.

Harmona took up her staff of black metal, her touch igniting the emerald flame that danced above its head. A circlet of beaten gold inscribed with a pattern of leaf and vine marked her status as HearthMother. It had taken her years to get used to wearing the circlet, but now she hardly noticed its presence about her forehead. She thought of it as little more than a device to keep her mass of dark curls from obscuring her face. The staff was a reminder of the world from which she had escaped. One day Sabine would ask for the story behind the staff. One day Harmona would have the strength to tell her everything. But that was not today.

They walked through a maze of lofty corridors and hanging tapestries toward the dining hall. The aroma of baking bread filled the air, along with the smokes of twenty-four baking hearths. Already the ovens were busy, tended by the staff of forty cooks male and female. The head baker greeted Harmona cheerfully and prepared a table. Several other families sat about the hall enjoying the day’s first meal.

In the ten years since Harmona had come to Gaeya, the population of HearthHome had grown from a hundred to nearly a thousand. Her people–and it had taken only a few months to begin thinking of the New Organics as her people–were multiplying. At least half the current population were adults or teenagers. The latest figures presented by the LoreKeepers indicated about two hundred children this year, half of them beneath the age of three.

As HearthMother her family extended well beyond those who had sprung from her own loins. Every one of these people were her family. They looked to her for wisdom and guidance and love. She sometimes doubted her ability to give the first two, but there was no end to her supply of the third. She loved the New Organics and she took every chance to remind them of that.

“Someone has to rule, even in paradise,” Dorian had said. She had refused the title of HearthMother when the Founders first offered it to her. It was Dorian’s belief in her that had convinced her to speak with the StoneFathers, and they had urged her to accept the honor. Nobody here was older than twenty-seven, and Harmona was a year younger than that, but still they regarded her as their wise woman, their leader, and the voice of their collective conscience.

She used to wonder if her possession of Sala North’s black staff had convinced them more than anything. She gave up that line of thinking, as it did not seem to matter. She carried the staff, she wore the circlet, and she spoke for the StoneFathers, whose power had constructed HearthHome from the raw stones of Gaeya. Any real wisdom that Harmona provided her people came directly from them. Serving them meant serving the New Organics, and that double service was the best way to show her gratitude for the life she cherished here in the green world.

After breakfast Sabine and Astrid went to the library for their morning lessons. Elodie accompanied her mother to check on the newest Arrivals in the nursery. Fifteen newborns lay swaddled in wooden cradles, tended by pregnant matrons. The women greeted Harmona and Elodie with quiet smiles. Harmona placed her finger to her lips, reminding Elodie not to disturb the sleeping babes.

She strolled between the rows of infants, pausing here and there to kiss a forehead or let a tiny set of fingers wrap around one of hers. These younglings would be adopted into HearthHome families as soon as the physicians gave them final approval. They had learned from experience to keep infant Arrivals under a watchful eye until they were confirmed free of disease and properly nutritioned. Sixty eager couples would draw lots for each of these babes, and the winners would gain new additions to their families.

“They weren’t born here, were they?” Elodie asked.

Harmona paused to kneel and examine her daughter’s face. “No,” she said. “They all came from places very far away. Soon each will have a family that loves them the way your father and I love you.”

Elodie considered her mother’s words. “Was I born here?”

Harmona’s cheeks reddened. “Yes,” she said. “You and your sisters were all born on Gaeya. The Arrivals were not. But we love them no less. Do you understand?”

Elodie nodded and chewed on her finger. “Can I go play in the blue garden?”

Harmona kissed her and nodded. A matron led the child away to where the Garden Mothers would keep an eye on her until dinner time.

Harmona went alone to the great amphitheatre. The Leaflings were rehearsing their next performance. At the Festival of Summer Moons the troupe would perform another classic. She observed their rehearsals whenever time allowed. Today there were no scrolls to study, no judgments to render, and no orchard inspections scheduled. If she could have remained a member of the troupe and still served as HearthMother, she would have done it. But being an actor required constant dedication and focus. Such a double duty was impossible, especially while raising three children.

The Leaflings were assembled on the stage at the center of the amphitheatre, running through the play for the fiftieth or sixtieth time. They still had nine days to perfect the performance. The stage decorations were being finished by painters, builders, and sculptors using the raw materials of the forest and plaster recreations of boulders, trees, and a small waterfall. The costumes were finished, and the actors wore their colors with obvious pride.

Harmona sat in the twentieth row from the stage, hoping they would not notice her. Of course they did, and the Brix the director waved to her from behind his sheef of notes and silken scarf. The current scene was dominated by Brix’s lifemate, Chancey, who wore a crest of wooden antlers and pranced across the stage in a pair of mock goat’s hooves. Harmona marveled at the quality of the costuming this season. If she didn’t know better she would think Chancey a living satyr stepped from the pages of myth. For a fleeting moment she wondered if there were any satyrs out there in the green world, waiting to be discovered by some future generation. Then the drama stole her attention as Chancey traded lines with Beaumont, who was dressed as King of the Wood.

“This is thy negligence!” cried Beaumont. “Still thou mistakest, or else committ’st thy knaveries wilfully.”

Chancey bowed low before his Woodking and begged forgiveness, antlers bobbing. “Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook. Did not you tell me I should know the man by his Athenian garments? And so far blameless proves my enterprise that I have annointed an Athenian’s eyes. And so far am I glad it so did sort, as this their jangling I call sport.”

The Woodking frowned with displeasure, his pointed brow rising at the latest wrinkle in his scheme. “Thou see’st these lovers seek a place to fight. Hie therefore, Robin, overcast the night. The starry welkin cover thou anon with drooping fog as black as Acheron, and lead these testy rivals so astray as one come not within another’s way.”

“Cut!” shouted Brix. “More rage, Beaumont! Your foolish servant has disappointed you. Let us see the Woodking’s anger before he gives his next command.”

Harmona smiled as Beaumont nodded. The costume designer adjusted the Woodking’s sparkling tunic and the crown of roses about his head. Again the scene unfolded, this time flowing smoothly into the next one. The Bard’s ancient story was well-told in the hands of the Leaflings. Harmona was proud of them. Yet within that welling pride lay the sting of jealousy. She missed acting, and she even missed directing, as frustrating as it could be. For six years now she had missed these things, but she never missed a Leafling show. Brix was a worthy leader for the troupe. It should have been Dorian, but he had quit the Leaflings when Harmona did, despite her protestations.

“How could I go on doing this without you?” he told her. “It wouldn’t be fun anymore.” On that day he had given her another reason to love him. As if she needed another one. In the six years since abandoning the stage, Harmona had learned to be an effective leader while Dorian had earned the title of HuntMaster, one of thirty men who bore that title. Harmona ruled HearthHome while her husband led men into the wild and returned with braces of wild birds to feed the population. The hunters also gathered fruits, nuts, and plants, discovering new kinds of vegetation every year. One day they would find the shore of the great ocean.

Harmona wondered what delicious treasures Dorian would bring home this time. Something succulent and delicious no doubt. She would enjoy nothing he brought her so much as the man himself. Their love had survived a journey across uncounted worlds, including the transition to Gaeya. Here it had blossomed like the worldforest, unstoppable and ever fertile. Dorian had given her three perfect daughters. She still had time to give him a son one day.

Lost in her private thoughts, she no longer heard the lines of the players on the stage. The presence of someone standing nearby was a sudden alarm. She turned her head, rising from the seat. A youth stood unspeaking, waiting for her to notice him. He wasn’t one of the Leaflings. She searched his narrow face and dark eyes for memory of a name. The green flame danced at the tip of her staff, shedding light without heat.

The boy’s eyes were narrow and his mouth was almost a snarl. She sensed the unhappiness radiating from his lean body, and it made her uneasy. He wore a knife tucked into the belt of his green tunic. A fringe of black thread ran along his arms and the sides of his leggings. His boots were those of a hunter, but they were spotless. He had not been very far into the wilderness, if he had been at all.

“Anton,” she said. She recalled his scowl from previous meetings.

“Lecuyer,” he said. “My name is Anton Lecuyer.”

“Of course.” Harmona indulged him. “What can I do for you?” His petulance was no secret. She remembered a conversation with his parents about his difficulty adjusting to this new life. How many years ago had that been? Two or three already. She heard rumors of him getting into trouble, but her advisors insulated her from these kinds of things. Why had this troubled youth sought her out? He should be learning a trade at his age. Let him get into the forest and discover his true calling.

Anton folded his arms across his chest. Bracelets of bone and copper hung on his wrists, the trophies of youthful sporting events. Wrestling, archery, or perhaps climbing. She regretted not having followed his education closer. Unhappy faces were practically unknown among the New Organics. She should have taken a greater interest in this one.

“I want to go home,” Anton said.

Harmona offered him a gentle smile. “This is your home,” she said. “Here you are loved and accepted for what you truly are. You belong with the New Organics. You’re a citizen of HearthHome, and one day you will inherit all its glories and wisdom.”

Anton turned his eyes away from her. “No,” he said. “I remember my real home. I was heir to the House Lecuyer. I am a Beatific. I want to go back.”

Harmona sighed. She sat down and gestured for Anton to join her. He refused, playing with the pommel of his knife and looking at the ground. The players on the stage ran through a scene of mock combat, Lysander chasing Demetrius with a leafy club. When Anton realized that she would not speak another word until he sat down, he finally took a seat across the aisle.

“How long has it been since you crossed over?” she asked.

“You mean since I was stolen?” Anton said. His eyes accused her as much as his words. “Taken from my true parents and brought to this wilderness?”

She ignored the trap set by his words. “How long?”

“Four years,” he said. His head hung low, elbows balanced on his knees. “And I’ve hated every one of them. I want to go home.”

“Those you remember were not your true parents,” she said. His eyes shot venom at her. “You’ve been told this many times.”

“I don’t believe it!” Anton said. A few of the players glanced at him, and he lowered his voice. Yet his tone remained insolent. “It’s all lies. I am the rightful heir to House Lecuyer and I want to go back. To my real home. To claim what’s mine. I hate this place.”

“We have not lied to you,” Harmona said. She spoke to him as she would speak to her own son. His anger was only a form of pain. She reached out to take his hand, but he pulled it away from her.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “We wear the same sweaty faces day after day, year after year. In this place we’re frail and weak. Watch–” Before she could stop him, he drew the knife and ran its blade along his palm. A red stripe appeared and blood began to drip on the marble floor of the amphitheatre. “We bleed! We suffer! We have to eat and sleep and rut like animals. Everything I was promised has been taken from me. I want it all back.”

“Give me the knife,” Harmona said, stepping close to him. She said it again, and he relented. She took the weapon and put an arm around his shoulder. He squeezed his fist and the blood seeped between his fingers.

“Listen to me, Anton,” Harmona said. “What you’re feeling is perfectly natural. You’re still very young, and you wonder what life would have been like if you hadn’t come to Gaeya. You think you’ve been robbed, but you’ve actually been saved. Everything you see as a weakness is in reality a strength. Trust me. We love you. I love you. Gaeya is a paradise. Don’t blind yourself to its wonders.”

“I’m not the only one,” he said, pushing her away.

“What?”

“There are others who want to go back,” he said.

“How many?”

“Enough,” he said. “Enough to make a difference. We want to go home. Why won’t you let us?”

Harmona shook her head. “You are the only one who has spoken such words to me. The only one.”

“I’ll show you,” said Anton. “I’ll bring them to you. You’ll see.”

“Wait, I–”

He was deaf to her plea. She watched him run out of the amphitheatre, heading for the southern gardens. She examined the bloody knife in her hand. His protest had come out of nowhere. She hadn’t expected her day to take such a dramatic turn.

“Are you all right, dear?” Brix came over to stand with her. He’d given the players a break. He saw the red knife and his eyes grew wide. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. She gave him the knife, asked him to do something with it. “I need to speak with the StoneFathers.”

Brix nodded as she walked away.

“Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown,” he said. She smiled back at him. “See you at dinner?” She nodded. Brix went back to his rehearsal. Harmona crossed the open courtyard to the Inner Sanctum.

Anton’s request was impossible. Nobody could go back. It would only mean death or worse. Yet how could she convince him that he was truly better off on Gaeya? And if there were other malcontented youths, what did that mean for the future of the New Organics? She considered dismissing the whole thing as the folly of youth, then realized the issue was too important to ignore.

As she climbed the steps toward the Sanctum, the peal of a horn rang across the courtyard. The sounding of the HuntMaster’s horn, announcing the return of his band. The low note quivered on the warm air and echoed from the stone walls. Harmona paused for a moment on the wide stair, closed her eyes, and thanked the StoneFathers that her husband was here to help her through this crisis. Perhaps all Anton needed was for Dorian to take him under his wing and show him the ways of the hunt. Most boys dreamed of that until they were old enough to go roaming with their fathers. Anton’s father was a gardener, but it was obvious that farming held no appeal for the lad.

A crowd of men, women, and children came rushing from the doors of the Sanctum and from the gates of the surrounding gardens. A babble of excited voices drowned out the chittering of birdsongs as Harmona found herself at the center of the welcoming crowd. They walked toward the western edge of the courtyard, where the Outer Gates were swinging open to admit the hunting party.

The boles of titanic trees stood like a wall of wilderness outside the gates. The crowd at the threshold waited for the hunters to emerge from the green shadows. At the first sign of movement the crowd cheered, launching into the Hunter’s Welcome with jolly voices. The traditional song of welcome was a custom that had existed even before Harmona had come to Gaeya. Not only did it celebrate those who braved the wild for the good of the community, it also bonded the New Organics in a way that all songs bonded their singers. It was the vocal expression of fellowship, gratitude, and sheer joy. Harmona did not see Anton in the crowd, but she knew he would not be singing.

The hunters marched out from a corridor of dense foliage. Immediately Harmona knew something was wrong. First, she noticed their diminshed numbers. Dorian had led twenty-five archers into the worldforest six days ago, yet barely half that number approached the open gates. Second, she saw the dirty bandages about their limbs and chests–bloodstained rags covering wounds of various severity. Third, the long faces of the men spoke volumes. Where were the smiles of victorious huntsmen? And where were the long poles heavy with the carcasses of fresh-killed birds? A terrible thought hit her like a physical blow: Where is Dorian?

She rushed forward to meet the hunters halfway to the gates, and the astonished crowd ran after her. The welcome song died in their throats, replaced by cries of confusion and alarm. A few men carried strings of dead birds at their waists, but most of them carried only spear and bow. Their quivers were mostly empty.

Harmona called Dorian’s name as she came upon the first man. He raised a bearded face to regard her with despair. He turned toward the rear of the procession, where two men carried a litter between them. Dorian lay asleep or dead on the litter, a blood-stained travel blanket covering his lower half.

She rushed to him, calling his name again. Her staff dropped to the ground, its green flame extinguished. Tears welled in her eyes as terror welled in her heart.

Dorian raised his head as the litter-bearers sat him gently on the ground. Harmona kneeled over him, kissing his cheek and forehead, then his lips. His pale face was damp and constricted. He seemed lost in a dream, or half-dead from weakness.

She barely noticed the women about her embracing their husbands and brothers, or demanding to know why their man wasn’t among those who returned. Nobody asked about the pitiful amount of game they had brought. Everyone knew there was something far more important happening here, but nobody knew yet what it was. The hunters were rudely quiet, embracing their loved ones with heavy arms, the wounds on their bodies speaking of deeper wounds that could not be seen with the eye.

Dorian lifted his right arm to take Harmona’s hand. His left arm was a mass of bloody bandages. He squeezed and she realized how little strength he had left. It dawned on her then that he might be dying.

“Out there…” Dorian tried to speak. “They came…” His beard was a tangle of matted blood, his hunting tunic ripped to shreds. She silenced him with a kiss.

“Don’t try to talk,” she said. She sent a runner to bring the physicians.

The weary hunters lifted Dorian once more and carried him through the gates. They had no more strength to carry him across the wide courtyard, so they set him on the lawn and dropped to sit among the ripe grass. Their families hovered about them and peppered them with questions, waiting to hear what catastrophe had befallen them.

Nobody had ever died on Gaeya. Not in the decade Harmona had lived here. Nobody died in paradise. The oldest person here would live at least seventy more years before old age killed the first of them. There were no vicious predators or lurking enemies in the worldforest. Or maybe, like the distant ocean, such threats had remained hidden.

What had Dorian’s band discovered out there?

Dorian lay half-awake, mumbling to himself in his pain. The physicians rushed into the courtyard, five of them carrying bags of medicine, white bandages, copper needles, and thread for stitches. One of them came directly to Harmona and pulled the blanket from Dorian’s litter. Harmona lost her breath. She stifled a scream by stuffing the heel of her hand against her mouth. Dorian’s lower left leg was completely gone. Jagged bone jutted from the raw flesh where his knee should have been.

Strong hands pulled her away from Dorian as the physician began his work. She turned to see Duval, one of Dorian’s hunters. His face was marred by a trio of long wounds across the cheek, daubed with mud to stop the bleeding. She fell against his broad chest, letting the tears burst from her eyes. She allowed herself a few seconds of weeping, then wiped her face with a tunic sleeve. She picked up her staff while the physicians did what they could for Dorian and the others. The green flame re-ignited at her touch.

Several women wailed now, realizing that their men were lost. Thirteen men had not returned from the hunt, and they never would.

“Tell me!” Harmona demanded, the green flame flaring at the top of her staff. This manifestation of her power seemed to shake the surviving hunters from their stupor. She grabbed Duval by the shoulder and demanded answers.

“What happened?” she asked.

Duval’s eyes streamed tears. The big man cried like a small boy.

“They came out of the trees,” he said. “We never saw them…until it was too late. All we could do was run…”

She stared at his mauled face. Madness danced like starlight in his eyes.

“They tore us apart,” Duval said, “with fangs and claws…” He wept freely, heedless of the crowd gathering around him, listening.

“They tore Fabian to bits right in front of me…took Dorian’s leg off. I saw one of them gnawing on it…when we went back for him.”

“Who were they?” Harmona asked. “What were they?”

Duval stared at the trees outside the gate. A gust of wind rustled the leaves.

“Monsters,” he said.

 

NEXT WEEK: “The Apothecaries of Nil”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 2

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INSPECTOR CRAG

Back at ya!

The response to Chapter One has been so positive and supportive, I decided not to wait a whole week to release Chapter 2 of the novel. Here you’ll meet the second main character CRAG and discover the bizarre (and often terrifying) city known as The Urbille.  I’m thinking I might release Chapter Three a bit early as well, since I want readers to meet all three main characters as soon as possible.  Special Thanks to everyone who shared my announcement about Chapter One. In the words of Ozzy Osbourne: “I love you all!”

Let’s rock…

 

A FEW ODD SOULS

Chapter 2.

Blood in the Rust

 

It was raining in the Urbille. The gutters sparkled with tiny rivers of black foam. Usually the Rusted Zone was a maze of red fogs and clouds of metallic grit, but the rain had cooled the streets and cleared the air. Heat rose from the pavement in curtains of steam. The stars were lost behind a canopy of curling smokes.

Crag walked through a slurry of rust and mud between the husks of ancient foundries. Most of the factories in this precinct were abandoned long ago. The broken bones of the buildings lay in the shadow of crumbling smokestacks. This was the ass-end of the Zone, a place even the Clatterpox avoided. A perfect place for murder.

The wind kicked up and Crag almost lost his top hat. He pulled the lapels of his waistcoat tight across his chest. He was following a hunch. The first six bodies had all been found within a two-kilometer radius of this place. Old Brickyard Avenue wound through the southwestern corner of the Zone. The victims, each one mutilated and headless, must have been killed here before being dumped into seven different rubbish bins. Nobody would hear children screaming in these decayed lots. Crag had studied a map of the Zone until a spark of inspiration ignited in the back of his skull. The spark led him here.

His opticals scanned the sodden pavement, looking for footprints in the shifting layers of sludge. The rain actually helped his search. Not even a lumbering Clatterpox would leave tracks for long on a dry street. The wind would blow any such marks to oblivion in seconds. But wet mud held prints intact for awhile, especially the rust-enriched ooze of the Zone.

Crag walked for an hour through the slurry as the downpour lessened to a steady drizzle. He had almost given up finding anything when he spotted the tiny trail of crimson rushing along a gutter to swirl down a drainage grill. He followed the gutter to its source at the curb of a derelict foundry, and a puddle of red at least a meter in diameter. It lay directly in front of a sliding iron door built high enough to admit a cargo lorry.

A smudge of red blood along the edge of the door almost resembled a handprint. It stood slightly ajar, and Crag felt the spark in his brain again.

The tiny gears in the fingers of his right hand clicked as he pulled the pistol from its shoulder holster. The door’s lock had been lost long ago, and the killer hadn’t bothered to replace it. Inside was a vast chamber of darkness, but a few stray beams of moonlight fell through the corroded ceiling. A tangle of rusted metal shards, iron vats, and  hanging chains filled the dark. Two sets of stairs led toward a gallery level above what was once a busy factory floor.

Crag stepped across the scattered debris. The trail of blood drops led deeper into the darkness. Nobody bled in the Urbille except children. Crag had found what he was looking for here. A muffled cry resounded from the walls as he reached the foot of the left stairwell. The red droplets led upward. The killer’s seventh victim was already dying.

Crag climbed the stairs as quietly as possible, hoping the killer was too busy with his prize, too secure in his privacy, to be alert. The next cry wasn’t so much muffled as torn from a tender throat. The stairwell vibrated with minute reverberations as the scream’s echoes died away. One more step and Crag’s head broke the plane of the gallery level. Deep within the shadows a flame flickered orange and golden, surrounded by the remains of extinct machinery.

Crag didn’t need to follow the drops any longer to know they led directly to the flame. A third scream, raw and animalistic, rang through the rafters. Crag moved forward, arms extended at chest level, pistol gripped in both hands. Finger light against the trigger.

There he was. The killer with his seventh victim. The smiling porcelain face confirmed what Crag had suspected: the killer was a Beatific. The lips of the alabaster face were painted blood red, and its opticals gleamed with emerald light, focused entirely on the young, bleeding Organic. The kid was probably twelve years old, four years from Conversion and adulthood. The killer kneeled before his victim at the center of a spreading circle of crimson.

Of course it was a Beatific. No Clatterpox could ever be this insane. Forty years of hunting his own kind had convinced Crag that the worst crimes were always committed by Beatifics. In all that time, he hadn’t established a theory as to why that was true. It was just something he knew deep in his coils. His heart-cogs increased their speed as the killer’s face lifted to regard him.

The elastic skin of the killer’s hands was drenched with the kid’s blood. A hooked knife gleamed dripping in each of those hands. Flames danced in a tin bucket nearby, the only source of illumination besides the killer’s green opticals.

“Don’t move,” Crag said. He aimed the pistol at the sweet spot just between the killer’s opticals.

“Inspector Crag,” said the killer. The child lying before him whimpered. Its small body was criss-crossed with a dozen preliminary wounds. Crag may have saved his life, but the boy would bear the scars of these wounds until his Conversion Day.

“You know me?” Crag said, stepping closer. Another two meters and there was no way he’d miss the head shot. Keep the creep talking.

“Of course,” said the killer. His fixed porcelain smile flashed in the gloom. “You’ve been in the papers. Chasing me down. I’ve been reading about you.” His dark waistcoat bore a white rose on its lapel. Strangely, it bore no sign of the blood that stained his coat and trousers.

Crag couldn’t see the kid’s face, but he could tell the boy was only half-conscious. The pain had been too much for him. Crag could almost remember what that particular sensation was like. It had been too many centuries. He barely remembered physical pain, but he knew the other kind well. The kind of pain that eats you up from the inside, the kind that started in the heart-cogs and travelled straight to the brain in its silvery casement. The pain of loss and loneliness and bitterness. He’d gladly trade that for some simply physical agony. But that was not how the world worked.

“Why’d you do it?” Crag asked, taking another step closer. Almost there.

The killer laughed, brandishing his bloody knives like conductors’ batons.

“I assume you mean the killing not the reading,” he said. “Do you really want to know, Inspector?”

“Tell me,” Crag said.”Why children?” One more step.

The green opticals glowed at him. The killer looked down at the kid’s body.

“They’re so young and pure,” the killer said. “So sweet and tender. I would call them innocent, but there’s no one innocent in the Urbille. I’m saving them, Inspector.”

“Saving them from what?” Crag was in range now. One pull on the trigger.

Something stalled him. Morbid curiosity.

“From becoming like us,” said the killer. His porcelain cheeks gleamed orange in the flamelight. “From losing everything that makes them human. Instead of dooming them to live forever inside a mechanized constructs–prisons!–I set them free. That’s all these clever bodies are, Inspector. Prisons. Surely you know that.”

“Drop the knives,” Crag said.

The killer’s left hand obeyed. Its knife clanged on the foundry floor, but the right hand retained its weapon. The killer’s left hand reached up to caress his own porcelain chin. With a deft movement he detached the Beatific mask and pulled it away, revealing the bare surface of his silver skull. His green opticals gleamed brighter.

“This is what we truly are,” the killer said. “Machines built from silver and tin, aluminum and copper, iron and steel. These faces we wear, they’re lies. Each one of us dies on the day of our Conversion. You don’t really think the brains inside our skulls are still alive do you? We’re all damned souls, trapped in our personal hells. So I free the little ones before they walk into the same prison that holds us for eternity.”

The spark jumped again at the back of Crag’s skull.

“It doesn’t matter whether you wear a porcelain visage like mine, or a bronze face like yours, we are all the same beneath the veneer of society’s masks,” said the killer. “We can’t even show our true faces in public. We are masked prisoners, spirits locked inside clockwork engines. I’m sparing the little ones this awful fate. Do you understand? Tell me you do.”

“Why torture them?” Crag said. He didn’t move at all. Kept the pistol trained on the sweet spot. The kill shot. Any second now. Why hadn’t he already pulled the trigger? Maybe he simply had to know what drove a Beatific to such horrible acts of violence.

“Torture?” the killer said. “No, I’m preparing them for the journey. Unlike us, their umblemished souls get to leave the Urbille. They travel who knows where–into the next universe or the next life. Suffering is good for the soul, so I prepare them for the journey by making their flesh suffer. I set them free.”

“What about the heads?” Crag asked.

The killer motioned to a point beyond the fire’s glow. A row of rusted spikes rose from the debris, each one topped by the severed head of a young victim. Six heads, and a dozen more empty spikes waiting. The colorless faces stared at Crag with slack jaws, most of them already gone to rot. This kid’s head would sit on the seventh spike soon, if Crag hadn’t discovered the killer’s private shrine.

“They speak to me. Remind me of how important my work is,” said the killer. “And they’re so beautiful.” He turned to look at the dead faces. The bleeding kid stirred and moaned. The killer turned back to him and lifted the red knife high.

“I’m setting them free…”

Crag pulled the trigger. A tiny hole blossomed in the forehead of the killer’s silver skull. Bits of grey-green brain matter spewed from the larger hole in its back end. The echoes of the shot rebounded again and again from the rust-eaten walls. The killer fell backwards, never losing his grip on the knife in his right hand. The gears and cogs inside his body shuddered, his frame convulsed, and his inner works stilled themselves.

Crag holstered the gun and examined the kid. The boy stared at Crag through bleary, tear-filled opticals. His soft skin was drenched in his own blood, but he was alive. Crag picked him up and carried him down the stairs, away from the madman’s grisly trophies. He set the kid down on a dusty tarp that was better than the cold floor. He knew how sensitive Organics were to cold and damp, two more sensations he couldn’t quite recall. Probably for the best.

Fifteen minutes later a lorry full of gendarmes responded to his transistor signal. They leaped from the vehicle and rushed into the ruin with loaded rifles, as if there were an army of child-killers about to rush from the shadows. Their faces were clusters of nine blue-green opticals arranged in rows of three. The lenses swivelled in all directions at once beneath the brims of stovepipe hats.

“Relax, boys,” Crag told them. “Killer’s already dead.”

“Nice work,” the captain told Crag. The rain was still falling outside. A few Clatterpox had wandered down the avenue from the Street of Ancillary Tongs, drawn by the sirens and lights of the gendarmes. A medical lorry arrived from the Minstere de Science to haul the kid away for surgery. They’d fix him up and return him to his Clatterpox parents. Crag wondered if the kid would be better off dying at the killer’s hands than having to live three more years in the Rusted Zone. He considered the killer’s mad logic and decided to forget all about it.

Crag declined the captain’s offer of a ride back to the station. He needed to walk after a killing, feel the solid ground beneath his heels, clear his mind of whatever detritius was left floating there after a case was closed. Time enough later for paperwork, and plenty of it.

He wandered into the populous regions of the Rusted Zone, where Clatterpox ambled about in steaming crowds. Their bulbous iron bodies resembled barrels with segmented legs and arms attached, their heads little more than ovals set with low-grade opticals. They recognized his bronze face, a signal of his rank, and made way for him as he passed. The neon glow of night club signs flickered and buzzed, turning the rain into gleaming curtains of pink and purple and scarlet. The sounds of Clatterpox revelry and blaring night-music swelled from the doorways. Gangs of Clatterpox youth, fresh from Conversion, filled the alleyways rolling dice or playing inscrutable games.

These were the poor of the Urbille, the working class. Crag knew their subculture better than most, but he would never understand it completely. He’d never know what it felt like to have your entire existence depend on a tiny furnace inside your chest burning chunks of anthracite, or to have his mind and thoughts encased in a clumsy body of rude metal without nuance or aesthetic value. As a Beatific, he was a breed apart from these people. Yet he knew the dark side of Beatific life, and the secret crimes that set them apart from those they considered inferior.

There were no Organics on the streets this time of night, none of the dirty-faced children being raised by Clatterpox parents. City law demanded that Clatterpox keep their charges indoors after dark. Organics were so easily injured or sickened, they needed the bright order of daytime to protect their delicate bodies. When they turned fifteen the Mechanics would perform their Conversions. They’d give up their frail flesh for a coal-burning heart and a sturdy body of iron and lead. They’d spew steam and smoke like the rest of their kind, and never look back at their fragile, disease-prone childhoods. Never again would they need food, water, or medicine. They’d be set for eternity, just like the Beatifics. And yet nothing like them at all.

Every Clatterpox seemed identical to Crag, but he knew they had ways of telling each other apart. A nick or dent here or there, a subtle shade of rust around the joints, a thousand other telltale signs that one was not the other. He’d known a few Clatterpox, even called them friends, but it was still sometimes hard to tell them apart without the insignia they wore when interacting with Beatifics.

Beatifics underwent Conversion at the same age as Clatterpox, but not at the hands of Mechanics. Highly skilled Surgeons transferred young Organic brains into silvery skeletons full of clockwork guts, covered them with elastic skin, and made them invulnerable to the weaknesses of the flesh. While Clatterpox bodies were functional and utilitarian, Beatific bodies were created for beauty, grace, and subtlety of movement. Crag considered his own feet inside their leather boots as he walked among the Clatterpox crowds. What marvels of engineering this Beatific body was, what miracles of science and creative design. Such thoughts always ran through his mind after putting down a rogue Beatific.

He found himself pitying the child he’d saved tonight. The boy would become just another Clatterpox, working in the factories of the Rusted Zone all day and wandering its  neon labyrinths all night.

I’m setting them free…

He ignored the madman’s words ringing like low bells inside his skull. He took the Bridge of Unremembered Dreams and found himself in a much better neighborhood. The wheeled carriages of Beatific citizens sat parked along the curbs, guarded by Clatterpox servants. A few Beatifics strolled arm-in-arm from club to club, their canes and top hats gilded with splendor, jewels glinting about the slender wrists and necks of the women. The faces worn here were mostly porcelain and finely crafted, often designed for slightly wicked affect. This was the Sordid Arena, where the Doxies did their business. Beatifics came here to dabble in the baser pleasures of life, to imbibe lubricants, listen to Clatterpox music, to gamble and cavort with regulated abandon.

A trio of gendarmes on patrol nodded as Crag passed them. He ducked through a doorway and entered the front room of THE IRON HEART. A sea of Beatific faces swam among the smoke from flickering braziers. He headed to the long bar and ordered a scalding lubricant. Poured it down his throat and enjoyed the tingling sensation in his coils. A few more drinks and it travelled along his limbs to the tips of his fingers. A Doxie approached him wearing a face of lascivious beauty. He motioned her away with a wave of his badge. He wasn’t in the mood for company tonight.

Why did the killer take his face off? Why show his naked skull to Crag like that? A crudely intimate gesture to the man who had tracked him down and was about to destroy him. Sure, the killer was insane. But his warped reasoning wasn’t entirely removed from reality.

These faces we wear, they’re lies.

Everybody lies, Crag told himself. This is the Urbille.

Each one of us dies on the day of our Conversion. You don’t really think the brains inside our skulls are still alive do you?

Of course they are. Crag was alive. Every Beatific, every Clatterpox was alive. If not for Conversion their Organic lifespans would have been less than a century. Conversion was immortality, and every citizen of the Urbille was entitled to it.

We’re all damned souls here, trapped each in our personal hells.

The man was mad. He’d offered a demented rationale for the terrible things he did. He was sick, that’s all. It happened. Far too often, it happened. Usually it was Beatifics killing other Beatifics. Family members or spouses, or even random passers-by. Some people couldn’t stand the good life. Crag’s job wasn’t to analyze and undertand why Beatifics committed crimes. His job was to bring them to justice, and he did it well.

He downed another glass of lubricant and wished Caroline were here to talk about this. She always had a way of making him feel better, especially after a shooting. She took him out of his head in a way that no Doxie’s thought-melding tricks could rival. Even from the time they were Organics, promised to one another six years before Conversion, she had always made him stronger. Made him whole when he felt like falling to pieces. It had been twenty years.

Thirty more to go.

Three more decades until he would see her again. Hold her hand, take her in his arms. Thirty years until he could take off this bronze mask and show her his true self, silver to silver, optical to optical, blend heart to heart, mind to mind. Time had slowed to a crawl these past two decades.

Sometimes Crag thought about not winding his heart-key in the morning and just letting himself fade away. Those were the days when his job and his life seemed without purpose. A meaningless existence of perfectly preserved nonsense. But if he did that he would never see Caroline again.

That’s all these bodies are, Inspector. Prisons. Surely you know that.

Crag slammed his glass against the bartop and was about to order an electrode stimulation when a hand grabbed his shoulder. A gendarme stared at him with its triple row of shifting opticals.

“Inspector. The Tribune wants to see you.”

“I’m off-duty,” Crag said. “Tell His Eminence he can congratulate me in the morning.”

The gendarme didn’t move. “I was told to bring you in, sir.”

Crag sighed and slid off the barstool. He stretched out his arms and legs, the tiny gears inside popping and squeaking. A cog slipped somewhere in his lower back. He was overdue for a spinal adjustment.

“No rest for the wicked,” he muttered. The gendarme gave no response. None of them had any sense of humor, at least not that Crag had seen in his forty-plus years of working with them. He followed the soldier outside to a waiting lorry. Slid into the back seat, thinking of the face Caroline had worn the last time he’d seen her. Twenty years ago. Mother-of-pearl inlays set in almond patterns about her golden opticals, a delicate nose crafted to perfection, turquoise lips set into the spotless porcelain, broad and smiling with affection.

Crag fell asleep in the back seat of the lorry as it rumbled toward the Ministere de Justice. Caroline’s sweet face floated like a moon in the black sky of his dreams. It spoke to him in the voice of a dead madman.

That’s all these bodies are, Inspector.

Prisons.

 

NEXT WEEK: “HearthHome”

Send your feedback to: johnny-nine@comcast.net 

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—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

A FEW ODD SOULS – Ch. 1

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SVETLANA

Greetings!

Welcome to my brand-new novel, A FEW ODD SOUL S . I’ve decided to release it on my website, one chapter per week for 22 weeks. Each chapter will be accompanied by an original illustration by Yours Truly.

Why am I doing this instead of publishing through “traditional” channels? A few reasons:

1) How many authors ever reward their fans with a free novel? A FEW ODD SOULS is for the fans of my Shaper and Tall Eagle books. (see sidebar for samples and ordering info) Thank you for reading my work, now here’s my latest and best — for you, for free.

2) I want to interact with the fans as they’re reading and consuming the story. So please drop me an e-mail after reading each chapter:

johnny-nine@comcast.net 

3) Releasing a complete novel for free subverts the entire publishing industry model. It cuts out all middle-men, gate-keepers, and bean-counters that stand between YOU and ME (Reader and Writer). I’m not in this for the money–I wrote for years before making any money from it. I’m in it to tell great stories, and to reach as many people as possible with them. 

4) It’s also a chance for me to re-ignite my dormant artistic skills. I used to dream about drawing comics for a living when I was a kid, and about twenty years ago I did draw a graphic novel (NECROMANCY: A DARK ROMANCE, later released digitally as SKULLS). However, that experience made me realize that I’m a much better writer than comic-book artist, so I haven’t drawn much in the past two decades. Now I’m going back to doing art that supports my story. Every chapter will have one relevant illustration that I’ve completed specifically for this purpose. Mostly I’ll be working with pen-and-ink.

A FEW ODD SOULS is my Weird Fantasy Epic. It combines several genres but remains weird all the way through. What does that mean? Well, you’ll just have to read it to find out.

Chapter 1 introduces SVETLANA, one of three main characters. In Chapter 2 you’ll meet INSPECTOR CRAG, while Chapter 3 introduces HARMONA. As chapters continue, the viewpoints of these three central characters will alternate from chapter to chapter, heading toward an inevitable collision that defies space and time itself. 

Cheers!

John R. Fultz

March 27, 2019

Fairfield, CA

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A FEW ODD SOULS

Chapter 1.

The Faceless Angel

 

The dead city was alive tonight.

The tops of its towers had crumbled. Most of its avenues were lost beneath a sea of rubble. A forest of weeds and creeping vines sprouted from the devastation every summer, only to die and rot in winter. A hundred years had passed since people had lived here. Most of their bones lay deep beneath the rot and ruin.

Omiska, they used to call it, those who had raised its towers and paved its roads. Those who were less than memories. Only the city’s name had survived, whispered by elders in campfire tales across the tundra. In time even that would be forgotten, as all things must be.

Yet tonight there were lights in the dead city.

The pale glow of those who had destroyed it.

Svetlana crouched behind a mossy boulder on the lower slope of the mountain. She watched the lights swim through the ruins like schools of phosphorescent fish in water. They glided toward the center of the wreckage. She could not see what was calling them together. She would have to get closer for that, explore the canyons of debris on foot.

The moon rose above the frosted peaks behind her. The gliding motes of radiance concentrated themselves at the heart of the dead city. A few stragglers drifted in to join the gathering. Eelheads. At least fifty of them, possibly more. She recognized them by the glow of their rubbery skins. Nothing else alive glowed like that. They were the ones who had conquered the city when her grandfather was young, as they had conquered every city across the world. They had built their own strange cities after wiping out most of the human population. She had no idea what drew them now to this forsaken place.

Svetlana had heard all the stories. She only half-believed that her kind once ruled this world, that millions upon millions of human beings had once existed. It seemed impossible that her people could breed in such great numbers, or that the eelheads could decimate so many of them. Yet the remains of great cities like Omiska — human cities — provided evidence that she couldn’t ignore.

In the books kept by the wise ones there were pictures of the human cities when they were alive with colorful multitudes. They had seemed to her younger self like visions from another world. Yet Svetlana’s father had taught her that the pictures were of true things, lingering visions of a lost glory. She had seen only one other dead city, a lesser version of Omiska whose name had been entirely lost. The eelheads had ignored that lesser ruin since destroying it during their great conquest.

She didn’t know what brought the eelheads swarming into Omiska tonight, but it must have something to do with the angel. The silver-winged angel without a face that had stolen her child. She moved down the slope, leaving tracks in the shallow snow. She didn’t dare to light a torch, but moved by the grey light of the moon. The wind whipped at her long braid, tearing loose strands of black hair that danced across her face. She stopped every few hundred meters to hide behind a rock or slip into a dry gully.

She avoided the yellow-barked trees heavy with bulbous veiny fruits. They were eelhead trees. They had spread across the world after the conquerors had claimed it. To eat their fruit brought madness, death, or worse. To walk within range of their stalks would attract their strangling vines. The trees fed on the blood of any living thing they could snare. Svetlana had seen too many men die in the grip of those thorny vines. The wise ones called them dyirevokrov, blood-trees. They drank lives in seconds, yet the eelheads could walk among them with impunity. Their poisonous fruits were a delicacy among the conquerors.

Svetlana climbed into a ravine and followed it toward the foot of the mountain. There might be sentinels at the rim of the ruins, but they couldn’t see her moving along the bottom of the crevasse. She moved across the uneven ground with caution. Her hands twitched, anxious to draw Takamoto’s blade from its sheathe across her back. She forced herself to wait. Even in the crevasse moonlight might glance from the blade and give away her approach.

She rested a hand on the grip of a pistol holstered at her thigh. It was a relic, an antique from the time before the eelheads came. Her father had kept it clean, oiled, and functional, passing the rituals of its maintenance on to her when her brother had died. A bandolier slung across her right shoulder held forty-six rounds. She had sold the last of her other keepsakes to buy the ammunition in Kirishni a week ago.

Tonight she could not use the gun at all. Its thunder would draw the eelheads in great numbers. If that happened, she wouldn’t stand a chance. She must be quiet and remain unseen. A mystery glowed at the center of dead Omiska. The key to that mystery would lead to her son wherever the angel had taken him. Not for the first time she wondered at connection between the eelheads and the angel. According to the oracle at Kirishni, she would find the answer here.

Svetlana had found the oracle sitting in a dim cave. The old woman sprinkled dust and bird-bones into a small fire. The oracle was old and toothless with skin like ancient leather. At some point the crone had eaten the fruit of the dyirevokrov and somehow survived it. A mass of fleshy tendrils grew curling from the side of her face. Her left arm had been deformed by the fruit as well. It writhed across her matted robe like a pale serpent, and a flower-like blossom sat where her hand used to be. She had gained magical sight by daring the madness and deformity of the blood-fruit. The oracle of Kirishni had paid a horrible price for wisdom.

“Your heart speaks truth,” the oracle said. “Your son lives, but he is far from you now.”

“Where?” Svetlana asked. She had crossed five hundred kilometers of wild tundra and snake-infested marshland, following the angel into the west. She had spoken with roaming hunters and blind elders in villages too remote to draw the attention of the eelhead armies. Now and then she found someone who had seen the angel flying westward like a golden eagle. Some even claimed to have lost their own children to the winged thief, just like Svetlana.

Yet none of them had ever been brave enough — or insane enough — to pursue it. Some told her the angel carried off babies for the eelheads to raise as slaves, or worse, for them to devour. But the eelheads did not eat human flesh, and they did not trust humans enough to enslave them. To the conquerors humans were no better than packs of wild dogs.

“Follow the mountains north to Omiska,” said the oracle. She sipped broth from a clay bowl. “There you will find the gateway of the angel. Cross it if you dare. Only by doing so will you discover a path to your lost son. You have a mother’s fierce heart. Let it guide you.”

Svetlana gave her the carcass of a pheasant she had snared to pay for the advice. She would have paid twenty such birds for the oracle’s wisdom. For the first time in six months of searching, someone had spoken hopeful words to her.

“Stay and eat with me,” said the oracle. The woman was hideously ugly but the cave was warm and dry. Svetlana agreed to sleep there until dawn. She helped to cook the bird. The oracle’s serpentine arm had a will of its own and could not be used for domestic chores. She wondered if the blossom at the end of its length would eventually sprout its own blood-fruit, pulsing with the lifeblood of the oracle. What might happen to one who ate the flesh of such a fruit? The thought made Svetlana lose all appetite, so she ate very little of the pheasant. The crone served her a bowl of goat’s milk instead.

In the morning, the oracle warned her not to go alone. “The eelheads are many where you are going,” she said, stirring the embers of last night’s fire. “Are there none who will accompany you?”

Svetlana shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about Takamoto.

“No,” she said. “Not anymore.”

The oracle understood and asked no more questions.

Eight days later Svetlana found the dead city, and after sunset the radiance of the eelheads began to concentrate at its center. Now she came to the bottom of the ravine, where it emptied into the flatland between two bald hills. She followed a frozen stream toward the outer ring of ruined structures. If there were sentinels posted there, they did not shed light. Of course, the eelheads could turn off their phosphorescence when they chose to do so. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe the absence of fleshlight meant the absence of guards.

She crept through the tall, frosted stalks of grass. The moon was high and brighter than she would have liked. She needed the shelter of the ruined buildings, where shadows would hide her advance. Until then she could not draw Takamoto’s blade, no matter how her muscles twitched and her fingers ached for it inside her gloves. She could have followed the overgrown road of shattered stones, but that would have exposed her immediately.

She kept low and half-crawled for about an hour. Finally she came to the low mounds of wreckage that stood like weedy hills about the ruins. She climbed atop one of these hills and lay there on her belly like a lizard. The sphere of light at the center of Omiska had grown even brighter. She crawled down into a crooked avenue and picked her way between the piles of rubble. Here she could stand erect, providing relief for the pain in the small of her back. She walked between the jagged columns of metal and the husks of collapsed lodges. Still she kept herself from drawing Takamoto’s blade.

She peeked around a corner and found a broad avenue leading directly toward the place where the eelheads gathered. She nagivated the detritus of a lost world, weaving between the shells of rusted carriages. A flock of bats burst from a ruined temple, disturbed by her passing. She lay still among the earthy rot until they spiraled away.

Following the central avenue, she came closer to the plaza where the great sphere of light seethed. Now she heard the moaning singsong of eelhead voices. No human could understand their speech, and the conquerors had never bothered to learn human languages. She had seen them marauding through villages or marching across the countryside, picking off stragglers with bolts of light from their crystalline weapons. She had recognized their garbled voices while hiding beside the open roads where they travelled in organized bands. But she had never heard anything like this, a cadence and rhythm that spoke of singing. Did these monsters sing? Perhaps she was only imagining the sounds as close to something human.

A sudden light along the avenue caught her by surprise. She dropped behind a mound of rubble as three eelheads emerged from an adjoining pathway. The light of their skins grew brighter as she crouched, a sure sign that they were coming her way. She slipped Takamoto’s sword from its scabbard, holding its grip in her white-knuckled fists. The weapon felt good in her hands, a reminder of better times. A bulwark against violence. The curved blade gleamed silver in the moonlight, but that did not matter now. The radiant eelheads came close enough to overpower the moon’s glow.

They did not go around the mound of rubble, but glided up the other side. She saw them clearly as they reached its summit, well before they noticed her. Their bodies were boneless, slithering things that stood upright by some unknown force of will. Spineless and hairless, their skin was a pale grey-green, their arms thicker versions of the oracle’s mutated limb. A row of fin-like protuberances grew along each of their limbs, and another ran up their backs to form a crest atop their oblong skulls. Their long-necked heads bobbed and weaved like aquatic snakes. Their eyes, like those of every eelhead, were tiny golden orbs above lipless mouths grown thick with uneven fangs.

One of them cooed a signal to the others as he spotted her crouching at the foot of the mound. They raised their deadly prisms to point at her, and she raced up to meet them. The sword flashed once, twice, but her third strike was hampered by the uneven footing. The blade tore through their soft bodies with ease, slicing two of them into four equal parts. The glowing of their skins faded as they flopped in pieces down the pile of rock and weeds. Their blood was translucent slime that smelled of unearthly things.

The third one croaked at Svetlana, displaying its fangs. A hot ray of light flashed from the crystal held in its psuedopod. Svetlana sidestepped the blast, ducking low and slicing at the eelhead’s legs. It fell without a moan or sigh, legless and spouting gore, lifting the prism toward her one last time. She swept the blade across the extended arm and the prism fell into the cracks between the broken stones. Her last strike took the creature’s head off. She wasn’t exactly clear where the neck ended and the head began, so she sliced clean through the point where a human’s jawline would have been.

She thanked her ancestors that these monsters died quietly, unlike the screaming men and wailing women they so casually murdered. She slid down the far side of the mound and crouched low. There were no other late-comers to the eelheads’ party. She wiped the slime from Takamoto’s blade with the hem of her cloak and did not re-sheathe it. She crept closer to the source of the radiance, knees bent, blade ready.

She had killed many men with Takamoto’s sword. Far more men than eelheads. Men always wanted something from her, whether she was willing to give it or not, and they always tried to take it. The eelheads would just as soon ignore a passing human as incinerate them. The conquerors were unpredictable, but as long as you kept hidden from them, you could usually avoid a confrontation. Yet human men had forced Svetlana to kill them time and time again.

“It is your beauty that draws them,” Takamoto had said. “There are too few beautiful things left in this world. You carry with you what every man wants. It will always be this way. That is why you must learn to kill.”

He had found her with a group of weeping refugees after marauders destroyed Komsk, the village where her father had raised a family. Such marauders were usually human, killing and burning everything in their path. Svetlana’s father had died in that raid, along with her mother and sister. The only thing left of her family was herself and her younger brother Mikhail, who was barely nine years old. The children huddled with the other survivors in the shade of a nearby forest and watched the village burn.

Takamoto was travelling with a group of swordsmen from an eastern village, searching for the bandits who had killed their own families. This was the way of humanity: Cycles of vengeance and violence that never ended. Takamoto and his cousins intercepted the marauders as they were enjoying the spoils of conquest. They built a pile of bandit heads in the center of the village when it was all over. It became a pile of blackened skulls when the fires had died away.

Looking for survivors, Takamoto’s band discovered the refugees and offered them food and water. Svetlana was sixteen at the time, and Takamoto was nearly twice her age. Yet she couldn’t know that when she saw his lean, handsome face. She helped bandage his wounds and this started a conversation that grew into a friendship. The surviors of Komsk followed Takamoto’s band north into the tundra, where they joined a nameless settlement that eventually became known as Borovichi. The bandits seldom came this far north, so a few years of peace passed while they learned to enjoy life on the cold plain.

When Mikhail died from the Green Plague, along with half the village, Takamoto and his cousins buried them with ancient ceremonies. Svetlana, at the age of twenty-one, had nothing left then. Nothing but Takamoto. She clung to him, a steady rock in the storm that was her existence. First they became lovers, and then she became his student. The blade he carried had been passed down to him from his venerable ancestors, as Svetlana’s pistol was passed down to her. She knew how to use it for hunting, but ammunition was hard to come by. If she’d had ammo during the razing of her village, she would have died defending it, instead of snatching the gun from her dead father’s hands and fleeing into the forest.

“This is not a weapon that you can depend on,” Takamoto said. He inspected the pistol as she was taking it apart, cleaning it with oil rendered from the fat of a roasted boar. “Without bullets it is no weapon at all.”

Svetlana had eyed him nervously, fiercely protective of the relic.

“It was my grandfather’s gun. And my father’s,” she said.

Takamoto raised a single eyebrow, the way he always did when he disagreed with her. “And yet it could not save his life,” Takamoto said. She raised an arm to slap him, but he caught her wrist in his fist.

“I mean no offense,” he said. “I do not say this is a worthless weapon. Only that it will betray you when you need it most. Unlike this…” He drew forth the slender length of steel with its rectangular black grip. The steel was clean and shimmering cold as death.

“A good sword will never betray its owner,” he said. “Only the owner may betray himself.”

Svetlana finished putting her pistol back together and slid it back into its holster. She placed it back in its hidden spot inside her lodge of painted hides. Unable to forget Takamoto’s words, she came back to him.

“Teach me,” she said.

At first he had refused. She tried to impress him with her mastery of the hunting bow and throwing knife. He ignored her for days, even when she refused to join him in the sleeping furs. He was implacable. He would not tell her why he refused, which only made her angry. A week later, she had almost forgotten asking him.

Then came the day when a new group of marauders found Borovichi. The village had grown large enough to attract raiders, and complacent enough to be caught unprepared. Takamoto and his cousins went out to face the bandits, who rode on the backs of horrid creatures that had once been horses. They had eaten the blood-fruit and they could no longer be recognized as four-legged beasts. How the bandits had tamed them she could not guess.

Svetlana and a dozen other villagers supported the swordsmen with well-aimed arrows, knocking the raiders from their beasts with a rain of flint-tipped shafts. But there were too many of them, and the supply of arrows was soon depleted. A few men with antique firearms ran out to join the fray, and many died before the last of the raiders fled. They had stolen several children but burned only a few lodges at the edge of the village.  Takamoto came to her after the slaughter, drenched in the blood of enemies. The rest of his cousins had perished in the defense of Borovichi, but he did not weep for them. Instead he brought her one of the fallen mens’ swords, placing it in her hands.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I will teach you.” She washed the blood from his skin and sewed up his wounds. Her training began the next day at sunrise. Each of the dead mens’ weapons was given to a villager who trained alongside her. She was the only woman so gifted. She knew it was because of her relationship with Takamoto, and so she did not question it. He loved her as she loved him.

The following spring the southern raiders returned. This time none of them had escaped alive. The last of their horrid steeds was butchered and thrown into a common pyre.

When the winter winds began to blow and the tundra grasses turned from green to brown, Svetlana gave birth to Dima. She had never seen Takamoto’s face alight with so much joy. He was like a different man, reborn in the glow of fatherhood. He laughed now, and smiled often. He was fiercely proud of their son, and at night he spoke of the dreams he held for Dima. Svetlana had given the baby her father’s name.

Dima was only six months old when the angel came for him. It was an early summer on the tundra, and the sun was warm that day. The last of the ice had melted, so she had gone to the nearby stream to bathe. Takamoto was out hunting with the men of the village. Little Dima lay on a flat rock next to the stream, less than three meters from where Svetlana washed herself in the chill water. The mingled aromas of wildflowers and fresh grass floated in the air.

She might have heard the beating of its silver wings if she hadn’t dunked her head underwater for a few seconds. In that brief interval of time, the angel had descended from the sky. She lifted her face from the water to see it bending over Dima’s blanket, wings half folded on its broad back. It stood far taller than any man she’d ever seen, its skin gleaming with sunlight, its head a smooth ovoid without eyes, nose, or mouth. Its silver hands lifted the baby from its swaddling even as Svetlana splashed toward the shore.

The angel raised its featurless head toward her as she leaped from the water. Its wings spread to block out the sky, casting her into a glimmering shadow. She saw her own face staring back at her in the silvery flatness of its visage. It made no sound at all in that moment. Dima was a tiny thing in its hands. Its entire body shone brighter than Takamoto’s blade, as if it had been forged of that same ancient metal.

She leaped for Dima, ready to wrestle him from the angel’s grasp, ready to die for her son if necessary. The angel was inhumanly fast. A single beat of its wings carried it into the sky, along with its tiny passenger.

Svetlana’s screaming brought the villagers from their lodges as she ran after the angel. Naked and howling, she chased it across the tundra. Followed it westward as it rose higher and higher, until it was only a silver mote gleaming in the blue gulf of sky. She ran until she collapsed and lost sight of it entirely. She lay in the cold mud and wept, her stomach emptying its contents, her limbs twitching with uncontrollable spasms.

Takamoto found her like that some time later. He carried her back to the village, warmed her with the heat of his own body, made her sip hot broth. He wept with her, and together they made a vow.

At sunrise they set out to follow the child-stealing angel into the west. The villagers tried to convince them that the baby was lost forever, that there was no chance of finding it. They should have another child and forget about Dima. Takamoto nearly killed a man for saying that. Svetlana stopped him from delivering the killing blow.

“Every moment we spend arguing with these fools, our son moves farther away.”

Takamoto sheathed his blade and turned his back to the village. After that day he never looked back, and neither did Svetlana. That was seven months and five hundred kilometers ago.

Now here she was, walking among the bones of dead Omiska. Alone.

She didn’t want to remember what had happened to Takamoto.

Not now, when she was so close.

The light ahead was brilliant. The eelheads were joined together in their chanting song, or whatever it was. There was a definite rhythm to the sound, although it kept shifting and changing in unexpected ways, apparently at random. Svetlana found herself at the mouth of a long thoroughfare, one whose flat stones had been swept clean of debris and undergrowth. On either side of the way stood high walls of cracked and weathered stone. An open court or plaza at the far end was the source of the light — the gathering place of the eelheads.

She walked on the flat stones, knowing that she could be seen easily now if anyone was looking in her direction. She hoped the ceremony of the eelheads would hold their attention long enough for her to reach the far end unnoticed. They didn’t expect a human to be anywhere near this place. That was her advantage.

There you will find the gateway of the angel. The oracle’s words.

The walls on either side of her were built of vast, smooth blocks of stone, but gargantuan faces had been carved into them long ago. They were the pitted faces of men, tall as ancient trees, with broad foreheads and sharply sculpted cheekbones. Their eyes were hollow niches where great jewels had once served as pupils. The eelheads or human bandits had long ago removed such precious things. The great stone faces were blind now, as heedless to the torments of this world as the gods of old must have been when they allowed the eelheads to destroy it.

Svetlana moved closer to the bright plaza, passing between a dozen pairs of great dead faces. Despite their hollow sockets, she imagined them watching her, smiling at her bravery, or her foolishness, whichever this was. They were human faces, but there was something inhuman about them as well. They offered her no threat other than a vague unease creeping into her bones. Their cheeks were lined with spidery cracks and eroded to smoothness by ages of wind and rain. The stone faces watched her in perfect silence as she approached the end of the avenue.

The plaza spread wide beyond the mouth of the thoroughfare, and its floor was also clean and level, paved with gleaming white rock. The eelheads didn’t just congregate here, they maintained this place, a realm of immaculate order nestled in the heart of crumbled chaos. She saw them clearly now: a mass of luminous eelheads kneeling and singing, gathered into a wide semicircle facing twin obelisks of black stone.

The black pillars rose at least twenty meters from the ground, wider at their bases and narrowing at their summits. A space of at least six meters separated them, an empty plane that flickered with motes of dancing light. Svetlana imagined the surface of a rippling pond in starlight, yet standing impossibly vertical between the obelisks. Each of the tall stones was three-sided with flattened tops and the densely woven characters of some unknown language carved into their sides. The carvings were eroded by centuries of wind and rain, but still they were visible in the luminosity of the eelheads. She realized suddenly that this place and its stones were far older than the eelheads’ conquest. Perhaps older than Omiska itself.

She had never seen the eelheads bow down to anything, not even their own leaders. Yet they kneeled here as if something holy stood in their midst. Something they respected, or feared. Or both. None of them took any notice of her.

She slipped along the back wall of the plaza, finding the nearest mound of rubble at its edge and hiding herself behind it. She watched the alien ceremony proceed. The space between the obelisks grew brighter, rippling with nameless colors. The hairs along her arms and the back of her neck stood up as the tingle of something unidentifiable flowed across her skin.

The space between the two obelisks rippled now, and the eelheads brought their song to a new pitch. They trembled and writhed like serpents along the flat stones, spreading pools of slime across the floor of the plaza. Some of them appeared to be copulating in pairs or in feverish clusters, but she did not look too closely at such terrible sights. She stared at the rippling air between the obelisks.

Now the ripples broke apart and a something appeared between the twin pillars, a gleaming presence bright as the sun. It wore the shape of a tall man with silver skin and feathered wings of the same color. It walked through the space between the obelisks as a man might walk through a curtain of beads, or float upward from the depths of a lake to break its surface. The eelheads writhed and sang as the faceless angel stood before them, averting their golden eyes from its illumination.

It was the same one who had taken Dima. Or one exactly like it.

Svetlana watched from her hiding place, frozen by a moment of terror. She clutched Takamoto’s sword in her fists. The terror passed, but she could not move.

Be still. Be patient. Watch and learn.

You are too close now to lose everything in the name of vegeance.

The angel held nothing in its metallic hands. No Dima.

Be still. Her eyes watered, and her heart hammered inside her chest.

The angel turned its faceless head toward the sky, where the first rays of sunlight limned the horizon with pink and crimson. Spreading its wings, it launched into the air. Svetlana watched it rise. Once again it became a silver mote, and then it was lost.

The ceremony of the eelheads continued well into the morning. She kept herself hidden, waiting for them to disperse. There were more hideous copulations, more spilling of fluids and singing of alien songs, and the sun rose high above the dead city. Svetlana found a niche between the walls of two roofless structures. From here she could see the plaza and the obelisks, but the eelheads could not see her unless they were to seek her out. They had no idea she was here, so she cloaked herself in patience and avoided the spectacle of their fornications.

She grew used to the sound of their droning chants, and she fell asleep for a little while between the ruined walls. When she opened her eyes the ceremony was fading and the sun was nearly at its zenith. She gnawed on a piece of dried fruit from her satchel, drank cold water from her canteen, and prayed to her ancestors that the eelheads would soon leave this place. She could not stand their presence much longer.

Gradually the eelheads grew silent, lying spent and exhausted on the ground about the twin obelisks. In the midst of that silence, Svetlana heard the flapping of wings. She poked her head out of the niche and saw the silver angel returning. It soared down from the clouds, clutching a tiny thing it its flawless hands. Svetlana could tell, even from this distance, that it was another baby.

The thief had stole another child.

The angel landed amidst the scattered forms of the eelheads. Those who were still awake bowed low before it, touching the tips of their snouts to the ground. It walked among them and past them, barely noticing them at all. The air between the twin obelisks quavered again, glistening and rippling like water. The angel walked between them and disappeared. Svetlana saw the stones of the plaza on the other side of the obelisks, where the angel should be standing but was not.

The gateway of the angel.

That’s what this place was. A gateway. If she followed the angel through it, she might follow it to Dima. It was likely to be carrying this new babe to the same destination, wherever that might be. She didn’t understand how such a gateway could exist, or begin to guess where it might lead. But it was the only possible way open to her. The only path that might lead to Dima. The oracle had said as much. She gripped the sword tightly in her fists and ran across the plaza. The space between the obelisks glittered with fading ripples.

In her haste she stepped on the flesh of several eelheads, who rose up immediately barking cries of alarm. They sounded like wounded pigs squealing in terror. Yet there was more of rage in those squealing voices than fear.

She swiped left and right with Takamoto’s blade as she ran toward the gateway, slicing limbs and heads, opening pale flesh in gouts of lucid gore. A few sizzling bolts of light sped past her. She moved quickly, bringing pain and death to anything in her way. The eelheads hissed and howled and squealed, but they were too spent from their long ceremony to effectively stop her charge. Half of them were still sleeping off their ritual of debauchery.

The space between the obelisks rippled one last time as she leaped between them. A sudden silence filled her ears, a blinding light claimed her eyes. A moment of weightlessness, a sensation of falling that was over almost before it had begun. Then her feet found solid ground and her leap ended in a clumsy fall. She held the blade at arm’s length to avoid cutting herself and rolled across the hot, flat ground.

In another instant she was back on her feet, half-blind and senseless, but facing the gateway. The eelheads might follow her through, so she needed to be ready. She yanked the pistol from its holster. With sword and pistol she waited, blinking madly, trying to see beyond the flares of light swimming across her vision.

There was no sound but the moaning of wind. The chill of winter was gone, replaced by sweltering heat that bore down on her like a physical weight, forcing the sweat from her pores. She wanted to tear off her parka and cloak, to rid herself of the gloves that had kept her hands from freezing.

Instead, she waited, ready to face a band of charging eelheads. Yet not a one of the aliens followed her through the gate. They were capricious and unpredictable creatures, their actions determined by some alien logic that humans could never understand. Svetlana gasped for each breath of hot air. After awhile she lowered the blade and wiped at her eyes. She holstered the gun and stripped off her cloak and parka. Her eyes adjusted to the searing brightness.

Already her throat was dry and she ached for a drink from her canteen.

She no longer stood inside the dead city. A sea of golden sand spread outward in all directions. The torrid wind lifted curtains of it from the top of each dune, scattering it across the land like a stinging rain. The sky was red, but it was not the red of sunset. Two suns burned in the sky, one bloated and orange, the other small and white.

She turned back to examine the gateway. The twin obelisks rose from drifts of sand that obscured their broad bases. Looking between and beyond them she saw only more sand dunes. There was no sign of her world, the world of tundra and eelheads and dead cities. There was only this sea of golden dunes. She remembered seeing pictures of places like this in an ancient book. The wise ones called it desert. Yet those deserts had lain beneath a single sun and a healthy blue sky. The sky in this new place was sickly, the color of thickening blood.

Svetlana lowered her eyes. She stood in the center of a broad road made of pale and seamless stone. The pathway ran directly from the twin obelisks into the shimmering distance, winding between the dunes like a frozen river. Somehow the shifting sands avoided the road when they should have buried it completely in no time.

The road itself began — or ended — between the two obelisks. There were only two directions to go: back through the gate or into the desert. Leaving the road to brave the dunes would only see her swallowed by the sands. She searched the red sky for signs of the angel. Nothing but a trio of dim moons and the two cruel suns.

You have a mother’s fierce heart. Let it guide you.

She could not go back. Not without Dima.

And there was only one way to go forward.

She cleaned Takamoto’s blade, slid it back into its sheathe, and followed the nameless road.

 

NEXT WEEK: “Blood in the Rust”

_____________________________

—  A FEW ODD SOULS Copyright 2019 John R. Fultz —

WEIRDBOOK Annual #2 – Cthulhu Mythos Issue

[image error]It’s here! WEIRDBOOK Annual #2 is available at last. A massive tome of all-new weird fiction—and poetry—all inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. 

A diverse assortment of eldritch horrors and terrors from beyond awaits the intrepid reader.

Includes my story “The Thing In The Pond.”

WEIRDBOOK Annual #2 – Table of Contents

•”The Shining Trapezohedron” by Robert M. Price

•”A Noble Endeavor” by Lucy A. Snyder

•”Ancient Astronauts” by Cynthia Ward

•”The Thing in the Pond” by John R. Fultz

•”Enter The Cobweb Queen” by Adrian Cole

•”Tricks No Treats” by Paul Dale Anderson

•”Ronnie and the River” by Christian Riley

•”Cellar Dweller” by Franklyn Searight

•”Yellow Labeled VHS Tape” by R.C. Mulhare

•”Tuama” by L.F. Falconer

•”Mercy Holds No Measure” by Kenneth Bykerk

•”Treacherous Memory” by Glynn Owen Barrass

•”The Hutchison Boy” by Darrell Schweitzer

•”Dolmen of The Moon” by Deuce Richardson

•”Lovecraftian Limerick” by Andrew J. Wilson

•”A Wizard’s Daughter” by Ann K. Schwader

•”The Shadow of Azathoth is your Galaxy” by DB Spitzer

•”Ascend” by Mark A. Mihalko

•”The Solace of the Farther Moon” by Allan Rozinski

•”The Stars Are Always Right” by Charles Lovecraft

•”Daemonic Nathicana” by K.A. Opperman

•”Asenat” by Ashley Dioses

•”The Book of Eibon/Le Livre D’eibon” trans. by Frederick J. Mayer

Weirdbook.

Get Your Weird On.

http://wildsidepress.com/weirdbook