Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 7

Getting Ready for the Weekend and Remembering faces

So this weekend is Kingsmead Book Fair, and I am pretty excited to be part of this, on a panel with Joanne Macgregor, Edyth Bulbring, and chaired by Bontle Senne.

 

We’re on at 13:45 in the Gym:

LOVE CAN MAKE YOU BEAUTIFUL

GymYoung Adult novelists Edyth Bulbring(Snitch)Cat Hellisen(Beastkeeper) and Joanne Macgregor(Scarred) discuss the themes of bullying and bloodlines, beauties and beasts and the transformative power of first love. Chaired by fellow youth writer Bontle Senne.

There will be an SASL interpreter at this session.

Now, fun stuff aside, I’m going to offer an apology in advance, and a small explanation.

Firstly, if you see me and want to say hi, PLEASE DO!

 

Secondly, even if we have met several times before, it’s probable I won’t recognise you. This is not because of you, it’s because of me. I have great difficulty remembering names and faces. I try very hard to build up a mental index card that matches people up, but if you do something like comb your hair differently, wear (or not wear) glasses, change your clothes, meet me in a different place, my index cards get scrambled and I need to re-sort them. This can take a while, and it’s very embarrassing for me because I hate making people feel like I don’t care who they are. I really do care, I just have an actual problem. The problem is made worse when I am anxious or stressed, and public situations make me both.

 

So, if it appears I have no idea who you are, just be gentle and say your name and remind me when we last saw each other and I can reshuffle my index. 

Gimme100 and the May Patreon Project

May is feeling pretty damn stressful. I’m still trying to sort out paperwork for the UK immigration thang, I miss that guy what I married once, I may have an aikido grading coming up, I’m still fixing the house, and I’m trying to reignite an old project for the agent-person. Add to that, I’ll be away part of May for the Kingsmead Book Fair.

So yeah. Feeling a wee bit eeeeeeek.

But mainly I need to be productive and all that nonsense, so to that end I have two small projects running. The first is a twitter-based bit of fun designed to get over that horrible feeling of, “oh god, words, they are scary, I cant make them, I’m going to watch Sherlock (again) instead.”

It’s called #gimme100, and the premise is that simple – give me 100 words every day. You can write more, but don’t write less.

@CL_Hellisen 205 words on random thing. Tired today. Maybe I need to plot a little on this tomorrow. #gimme100

— Ruth EJ Booth (@ruthmidget) May 3, 2016

and people have started joining in, which is pretty cool.

@CL_Hellisen I did my words yesterday! Not on the chapters I needed to, but wrestled them out anyway #gimme100

— Lesley Wright (@les_wright) April 27, 2016

@CL_Hellisen finished my #gimme100! Cranked out something unrelated to anything big I’m writing, so blogged it https://t.co/tRmGMRxREe

— Blaize Kaye (@bomoko) May 3, 2016

My other project is for Patreon, where I’m growing a story from seed, showing how I grow, compost and prune a short piece of writing.

DOGLEAF

(start here)

(previous)

I heard funeral chants. They were distant dreams while I was buried under a blanket of soft goat wool. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead of being alive, I lay in a half-world of raging sands and alternating fogs so damp and heavy that they pinned my arms to my sides, kept my eyelids pressed shut. It was better to stay there than wake and deal with everything I’d lost.

My skin feels tender and stretched, even the slightest movements pull at stitches, remind me of my bruises.

The thunderstorms rolled out the days, counting each passing afternoon in flashes of lightning. In the dripping silence after the rain, the pied crows kah at each other in the gardens. Light seeps into my room.

Carien’s ghost watches me silently from the dusty streamers of sunshine.

Or perhaps I am dreaming.

I fall asleep again.

* * *

“You should be glad you missed the funeral,” Harun says. It sounds like he’s sitting near me. I’m almost alive. Servants bring me light soups, tea for the pain, they shake me gently awake and make me eat, but this is the first time I remember Harun coming here to this sick room. So I have been saved, but I don’t care.

“Bloody awful affair.” He sighs, and the leather of the seat creaks. “I’m not grateful to you. Not for going off at Eline like that, thinking you could save everyone like some grand hero.” I suppose, at the very least, with Eline’s death the proposals will be forgotten, and we have bought Isidro and the other vampires a little more time before the next fool decides to revive the idea. There will be no more vampire murders. I’m sure Jannik would have thought it worth dying for.

Harun’s boots sound dully on the carpet. He’s pacing now, his voice moving away, then closer, away again. It’s annoying. I will him to stand still. “You’re damn lucky, and you should be dead.”

Damn lucky. If I hadn’t broken the bond with Jannik, I would be dead. Luck. I suppose. If one wants to call it that.

I drift back into my safe little cocoon of nothingness. Inside my head, the childhood room is gone. There is no sign of Jannik or anything else. I set to the painful task of rebuilding, even though I don’t know why I am bothering. Using my room again seems wrong, somehow. Instead, I call up a desert of glittering sand; a white beach without the sea to soften it. An empty world. I sit cross-legged in the sand and pull the walls up around me, raising them higher and higher and curving them overhead, blocking out all the light. I stay there in my dark empty house.

It feels wrong. I am not Jannik. He is no longer a part of me. I am a War-Singer, and our art is strange and subtle and fragile and sharp. I press against the sand, heating, changing it, and the walls shimmer and turn pale, letting in a golden wash of light.

An empty glasshouse. Jannik had his birds, his rippling streams. I fill my house with secrets and memories that are as varied and alien as the plants I have painted in my little botany books.

* * *

When I am finally able to sit, the servants help prop me up with hard pillows, bring me heartier fare to eat, and send for their master.

“Finished sulking, have you?” Harun drags a chair across the room, and sits in it with an irritated sigh.

I wait for him to tell me the news. I want to ask him about what he did with Carien’s body. I want to ask him how Jannik’s funeral went – who went to mourn him, but the words burr up in my throat, tangled and tight.

“Yew turned his coat,” he says. “But I suppose you must have realized that much. He asked for the Lark, in exchange for bringing you back to us.”

The stew is cold and thick. My hand trembles as I press the spoon to my mouth.

“I thought it a small price to pay.”

I wonder if the time will come when I will not care.

“You broke the bond,” he says. “Isidro didn’t know that was possible. He still insists that it’s not.”

“You have your proof.” They are the first words I have spoken in so long that my voice sounds as if it belongs to some other person. Perhaps it does. There is an emptiness in this new Felicita that can only be filled up with a lifetime of bitterness and longing. In my glasshouse, the memory of lying against Jannik unfolds, the petals curling outward. The words I never said to him hide thornily among the black sea roses. “I am, after all, alive.”

“And as waspish as ever.” He stands. “Eat your food. Rest. Recover.”

I close my eyes and wish him away. This time it seems to work. When I am ready to look again. I am alone. I force myself to push down the covers. I feel feeble, and old. Brittle. Somehow I manage to hobble to my dressing table, to the little hand mirror. All it shows me is my own reflection, wan and ghostlike though it is. Of Carien, there is nothing.

Even so, I press my mouth close to the glass, so that my breath mists the silver. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I killed him.” For you. “You can go now.” I bring the hand-mirror down on the corner of the table, so that it shatters into a thousand pieces and scatters across the plush carpet.

With that done, I manage to drag myself back to bed.

* * *

I wake to a face that I wish I could bring myself to hate. Isidro is standing in the doorway of my room, leaning against one side, almost hesitantly. It seems that he is not yet ready to walk into this sickroom. He is holding a leather-bound book in one hand, a slim volume with gilt edging the pages.

“Of all the people I do not wish to see, you are the very first of them,” I tell him. He is a reminder of everything I have lost. Lost because of him, if I choose to look at it that way.

“Tell me how you broke the bond,” he says.

“Regretting your marriage?” I look away from him. Someone has cleared away the broken mirror, and left an arrangement of dried dogleaf on my bedside table. One of the Hobs, I suppose, determined to ward off the cats while I was dreaming. A fixative for perfumes, meant to help it last longer. Somewhere in my glasshouse, dogleaf is blossoming. A fixative for memory, meant to make it last longer.

Isidro laughs in derision. “Not as much as you seem to regret yours.”

“I regret nothing,” I say. “Nothing about that, at the very least.”

“And yet you’ve not once asked about him.”

“What good would it do to ask after a corpse?” I ask bitterly. “Am I to ask what was inscribed on his stone, if the rain fell or the sun shone, how many mourners you had to hire?”

Isidro frowns. Finally he steps into the room and throws the book on the bed. It lands just off my lap. A copy of Traget’s Melancholy Raven. My heart seizes, and my face feels frozen and dead.

“Here,” Isidro says. “Jannik can’t walk yet, but he says to read it again, that this time you might even enjoy it.”

I make myself look up at him, too scared to ask him to repeat himself.

“Yew kept his heart beating until the physicians could be called.” The vampire shrugs, and for a moment he looks almost vulnerable, his cold mask slipping. “And so we are both in Yew’s debt.” He snorts, and the flicker of emotion passes. “Or were you hoping that you’d freed yourself?”

I take the book in both hands and hold it close to me. I can see Jannik as I remember him. Head bowed at his desk, tea growing cold at his elbow as he reads this book for the thousandth time. The skew-sharp smile, the fox-fast kisses, black hair and white fingers and all the futures Harun has seen for us. I’m crying. I wipe the tears away and find laughter and relief bubbling together in my chest. My glasshouse brightens, the flowers throwing back their heads to the sun.

“Just for today,” I say to the surprised Isidro, “I will forget to hate you.” I break a sprig of dogleaf free. Keen interest, and a fixative. “Go tell Jannik that I’ll read his damn book. And give him this.” I hold up the innocuous little sprig of grey leaves and yellow buds.

Isidro leaves me alone in the room with Jannik’s treasured poetry for company. I brush my hand across the thin creased leather of the cover.

Not that alone. Not alone at all.

Finding new shapes in words

I’ve spoken a bit before about losing the joy in writing. For a good while now (since writing and selling Beastkeeper), I’ve been struggling with my novel-writing. No matter how many novels I start, I decide they are trash, will never sell, and that I’m wasting my time. I junk that book and start the next one, hoping that this time I can stop sounding like Cat Hellisen and instead write something that will appeal to a wider range of readers and therefore to editors.

Lather, rinse, repeat, because you know how people talk about “finding their voice”? Yeah. I have a voice. This is my voice. If we were talking in terms of singing, I am not Britney Spears or Lady Gaga or anyone else whose name you know. Maybe I’m Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy  (though he’s more productive and better known than me, Especially as The Palace Brothers, which was my intro to his sound, so…maybe not). Still if this is what I sound like to other people then it might explain my lack of chart success. (FTR, this is one of my favourite songs).

Anyway, so now I have to take a different path. Less of the “finding my voice” and more of the “accepting my voice”. Knowing its limitations and working on those areas, reveling in the bits that sound like no one else but me.

But that means not throwing away the stuff I’m working on, and damn, let me tell you – that’s scary. To keep writing something even if you know most people are going to go eh, whatever, Next! That goes against everything I wanted for myself as a writer (a career, fans, books in book stores).

So I’m doing it in small steps. I am writing 750 words a day on my novella and NOT DELETING because Cat, you can fix this later, stop hating on everything you write. At least for the moment.

I’m remembering to enjoy doing small things that give me space to sing – like poetry, or fanfiction, or flash pieces. Stop worrying about selling by writing stuff that I know already doesn’t sell, so it doesn’t matter.

When I am done with the novella, my agent wants me to work on an old novel that I had (once, again) abandoned, and it is all stitchery and witchery and women’s gods and women’s power, so I am pretty excited to get back into that world. This is why I write, so I can play.

In the mean while I have books out there on submission, and one day they will find the editors they are meant to find. Or they won’t. And that’s just how it goes. All I can do is keep writing small and large about the things that interest me. Making up my own songs, drumming my own beat.

 

Some Rather Nice News

Last night was Bloody Parchment, the literary wing of Cape Town’s annual Horrorfest. This was the first year Bloody Parchment joined the rest of Horrorfest at the main venue (the wonderful Labia Theatre) and I think it was a good move to bring the two together.

I was one of several writers reading that night – some read their own work, some chose to read other people’s stories, and there was a nice mix of classic horror, from the usual horror icons of serial killers and monsters, to plagues, man-hunting dogs, dead film stars, and soul-swapping zombies, and finally to chat about the films and fiction of horror icon Clive Barker.  Prizes were won, wine was quaffed, popcorn munched, jelly brains and eyes squished, and Nosferatu watched over everyone like a really ugly angel.

Thanks to all those who came through, and to all the organisers and participants for inviting us along.

A PLAGUE OF HOUSES

The city stinks of death. High summer has MallenIve by the throat and my apartments in the House Pelim holdings are stuffy and humid. We are miles from the Hob slums where a plague is currently raging, and still the air reeks of burned skin from the pyres.

Hardly an auspicious start to the season’s round of parties.

I slump in my rooms at the very top of the house, waiting for respite. Fine rivulets of sweat trickle down from my temples, and I pant while fluttering a small round paper hand-fan – MallenIve’s latest fashion – uselessly through the air. All it does is waft the heat around. At least the Houses only bother with their entertainment in the evening, after the thunderstorms have damped down the baked dust and washed away the stench of the day’s unfortunate corpses.

It’s not just the poor. Everything seems to be expiring. Just yesterday when I ventured out, desperate for some kind of contact that didn’t involve servants or the implacable mask of my husband, I saw one of the shaggy, goat-like nillies drop dead in its traces. The creature just crumpled in the middle of the street, between the shit and the pedestrians. Traffic in MallenIve is so slow and congested it took minutes before anyone but me realized it was dead.

That moment as it died and the golden eyes went dry was the first time since I came to this monstrosity of a city I felt a kinship with another living thing. It too had had enough of this stinking place.

So melodramatic, I’m sure Jannik with his penchant for awful poetry would approve. Somehow, I suspect I shall cling to life a little longer than the broken nilly. Our moment of mutual feeling only extended so far. There is no way for me to go back home, and I think I am long over the childish petulance of suicides. How grown up you are, Felicita. Even my inner voice manages to sneer at me. Almost eighteen and so very adult.

“Oh, hush,” I tell myself as I wipe a palm across my sweating brow. “I am allowed to wallow in my self-pity, at least until tea.”

My mother would have understood. She wouldn’t have approved, but she would have given me a little space to indulge in some of my teenage misery. Or perhaps I am remembering her too fondly. After all, there is distance between us greater than miles. She has absented herself as my mother and her letters to me are few and say little. All I really know is that my brother’s widow has moved into the family house. I wonder if Mother gave her my turret room so that the poor girl could pretend she was at least a little bit free.

Enough of this. I refuse to entertain these maudlin thoughts. I take a deep breath and push the image of my mother out of my mind.

A small, timid knock sounds at the door, and it’s the signal that the worst of the day is over. Tea is the precursor to the punctual afternoon storm. A slight Hob girl with her dark curly hair pulled back in a neat bun comes in. The starched whites of her sleeves almost glow against the yellow brown of her hands as she sets down a tray of tea, honey, and milk. The grassy smell of redbush fills the room.

“Thank you, Riona.” I drop the fan on my dressing table with a clatter. I like this girl; she’s soft and sweet, but underneath that she’s got spine. She knows her letters, a remarkable enough thing in a Hob straight from the vast township that encircles MallenIve. I’ve worked at her, winkling her slowly out of her shell like a little sea snail. When she first started working for me she’d stand mutely staring as I tried to ask her questions about her life and her family. Eventually she stopped giving me looks of blank astonishment, and these days she actually manages to roll her eyes at me and hum in exasperation when I am at my most annoying. None of the other staff have followed her lead. I suppose the MallenIve Hobs are as unused to a Lammer speaking to them as if they were people as the Pelimburg Hobs are.

I confess, a year ago, I would have given no more thought to her and her life than I would have given a pack animal. My time in the Whelk Street squat changed me more than I like to think about.

“Your brother?” I say as she pours the tea, “Have you any word?”

“He’s doing better, my lady. Thank you,” she whispers. Her older brother works the scriv mines out past the city. When the black lung hits, the miners with their ragged lungs are the first to fall. From what she’s told me, Riona has no other family besides him. We can do little enough. I have sent a physician – who was rather disgruntled at the task – to see to him, and have paid for medicines, but the black lung will take who she will. If he’s doing better, then that’s as the world has decided.

“That’s good news then,” I say brightly. Mentally I add another task to my daily list: have the kitchen staff make up a package for the boy: food and blankets, and lemons and honey for his throat. Mrs. Palmer will pull faces, I know, but for all her scowls and mutterings, she’ll wrap Riona’s brother enough to feed a Hob-pack.

“Yes, my lady.” Despite my attempt at friendship, the girl refuses to call me by anything else.

I sigh, and flick the handle of my fan so that it slides across my table. Small steps, Felicita. You cannot change a city in a day. Or a year.

“Will you be painting today, my lady?” Riona says as she stirs honey and milk into my tea.

“Please, Ree. I have asked so very many times.” I catch her free hand in mine and feel her muscles twitch at this unwelcome display of amity. “Felicita will do just fine.” After all, I threw away my pretence at ladyship when I ran away from home and dishonoured the Pelim name. It’s why I’m here in this stinking hole: to do my best to make up for all my flaws. I let her hand go with a sigh. “Not today, I think.” Another glance out the window confirms that the clouds are rolling in thick and heavy. And tonight’s engagement weighs on me as much as the clouds do. I’m in no mood to paint flowers.

A sudden thunder rolls through the house.

It’s not from the coming storm and there was no warning flash of light. It sounds like falling rocks and the walls and floor are shaking. Tea has spilled over my desk. My heart jumps in my chest like a landed fish. Earthquake. MallenIve has the worst luck of any city and if I stay here any longer I’m bound to be swallowed up and destroyed. “What was that?”

“It’s a mine, my lady.” Riona looks almost as if she is about to laugh. “One of the old scriv-tunnels must have collapsed.” She’s already wiping up the spilled tea and has set to pouring me another, completely unflustered.

“And where exactly are these tunnels collapsing?” I ask faintly.

She shrugs. “Under the city, I suppose. You shouldn’t worry, my lady, it doesn’t happen often. One time, a hole opened up right in the middle of a street, my brother says, but that was years back. So you mustn’t fuss yourself. Anyone born here is used to them.”

Plagues, collapsing streets, and high society parties.

I think I am ill-suited to this city.

A crack and flash herald another rumble, this one coming from the sky and quickly followed by the first spatter of rain. At least the house isn’t shaking any more. “I’ll need Cornelia to come up here, as soon as I’m done with tea.”

Riona nods and withdraws, and I am left alone with my porcelain and my fan. I pick it up again, not in the mood for the cloying heavy-milked drink.

After the punctual storm, I will have to bathe away the day’s sweat, be dressed up in another revolting MallenIve gown, put on my prettiest, most wide-eyed and imbecilic face, and go out to pour my share into the urn of social spite that oils the gears of MallenIve’s most powerful Houses. Usually I have to do it alone. My husband is not exactly welcome among the wealthy elite. They cannot wrap their minds around the concept that in Pelimburg, the vampires can be born into free Houses. In MallenIve, they are still nothing more than dogs, bought and sold on a whim.

“At least tonight will be a little different,” I say to the fan. My hand stills, and I turn my wrist so that the fan seems to be staring at me. It is white and blankly incredulous. It nods, and I talk to myself in a low cruel voice, as close as I can get to my dead brother’s. “You chose this,” the fan says, bobbing with each word. “I have no patience for whining little girls. And that, Felicita, is all you’ve ever been.” All you ever are, and ever will be, it doesn’t have to say.

My stomach cramps, and a dry needling pain flickers in the corner of my eyes.

“Shut up, Owen,” I say quietly, and I drop the fan onto the polished vanity counter, among the scattered bottles of perfumes and precious oils.

Another distant growl of thunder signals the change in the day. I press my fingers to my temples, trying to push away the ache that will come soon, the closer the evening draws. I have no idea what to expect from tonight’s invitation. It is from Guyin Harun, who has committed the singular sin of not marrying a suitable House woman and breeding suitable House heirs. His situation is similar to my own, and so fate has seen fit to push us together. In a way I would prefer to be on the safer ground of being shunned by the other High Houses of MallenIve. I have learned to deal with their particular patronizing brand of false sympathy. Rather that than have to face the mirror and see for myself what exactly Jannik and I are: a mismatched and untouchable pair of nothings.

* * *

The invitation flutters in my gloved hand as the carriage draws to a halt outside the white-faced house. I’ve managed to smooth away my earlier disquiet, pat it under layers of powder and paint, and lace it up into stays and boning and silks. Naturally, I have said nothing to Jannik. We have little enough to talk about at the best of times. The only things we have in common are deep and ugly, and too newly scabbed over. My betrayal of my family led to the deaths of so many, not least of them the lover Jannik and I shared.

That same lover used us and twisted us to his own ends and I should hate him. Only I can’t.

How much worse it must be for Jannik, who, I think, loved him. We never mention the name Dash, we do not talk about what led us here to MallenIve.

Instead, we prattle of slight inconsequential things, like invitations to parties.

“Rumour has it that the Guyin hasn’t been seen in years. Never leaves his home, never invites anyone in.” I tuck the card back into my purse, and force myself to act cheerful. Even if it is just more political machination, it’s still the first time both my husband and I have been invited anywhere together. All I can hope is that this particular evening doesn’t ruin my social standing in MallenIve. I’ve managed to claw a little bit of status back, and we need that if we are to survive here. “I sense a long night ahead of us. Gris alone knows if the man has even a modicum of social graces. Last time anyone saw him, he set his dogs on them.”

“Felicita, it’s one evening. I think you’ll live.” Jannik remains as expressionless as the waiting building. The last few months have made him less awkward, he seems to have grown into his beakish nose, and his dark hair hangs past his collar. While he will never be beautiful, there is something in the paleness of his skin and the deep blue emptiness of his eyes that constantly draws my attention back to him, though he never seems to notice my stares. Tonight we are forced to spend our time together. His mother made the arrangement for us and even at this great distance, my husband will not go against her wishes. Not again. Marrying me was a big enough rebellion for him.

“This is House Guyin?” I had expected something more imposing and ancient to match the legacy of the name; a dark glass tower and crows in lightning-blasted trees. Instead we are presented with a façade like a plaster skull posed in an apprentice’s still life. It shows nothing, no emotion or accusation or welcome. Even the ubiquitous dogleaf in their grey stone pots are limp, the buds still closed and anaemic. The knocker is a dull hint of brass against the un-oiled wood.

Jannik shifts, puts one hand against the leather seat, and prepares to stand. “Apparently so.”

My dress makes it near impossible to exit the carriage with any dignity, although I do a passable imitation. Jannik takes my hand and helps me down from the little step and the emerald taffety armour of the horrendous dress crunches. I have always been of the type that rather than being improved by ornamentation, is left looking shorter and rounder. MallenIve style does me no favours. “I feel like an enormous idiot.”

“Only you look rather like an enormous hand-bell.”

I glare at him. “It’s hardly my fault MallenIve pays so much attention to the idiocies of fashion.” It is a city founded on pretence and artifice. Unfortunately, as the public face of House Pelim, I must play by all the little rules the city dictates. And if I’m the acceptable mask that fronts House Pelim here, then Jannik is the mind behind it. I frown. Jannik, clever as he is, needs to stay hidden.

This is not a city that has any great love for the vampires. The only reason this invitation includes him is because House Guyin are the only other family who have allowed a marriage between a Lammer and a – bat. I shake the word from my head. I’m becoming too used to the casualness with which the people in MallenIve dismiss the vampires.

Jannik crooks his arm, waiting for me to join him. I welcome the flutter of his magic as I allow myself this little moment. We have never spoken of it, but it’s this that draws us together: his latent, unusable magic, and my fascination with it. Together we walk up to the bland door. A flicker of apprehension tumbles about in my stomach like a moth trapped in a closed room. I breathe deeply and ready myself. I can deal with one more condescending House heir, I really can. I have a life-time of experience.

A Hob-girl opens the door as we approach, curtseys hurriedly then leads us in to a formal sitting room. The furnishings are at odds with the more modern house; they are old, fine pieces, although much in need of some oil and attention. The furniture, at least, speaks of time and tradition and a hint of eccentricity.

Two men wait for us.

I’m overdressed. Jannik wears a Pelimburg suit – understated, black. He has not bothered with the parrot-brights the men in MallenIve have taken to. And neither, it seems, have our hosts. The Lord Guyin Apparent is coat-less, gloveless. His partner, standing behind him in the shadows, is also wearing black.

In my emerald flounces and frills, with my ridiculous layers of petticoats and my beading and gloves and hairpins, I am totally out of place. This is not my usual battlefield, and my armour is foreign.

“Welcome.” Lord Guyin steps forward. He’s of average height, with a lean jaw, and dark golden-brown hair that falls to his shoulders. There is something about him that demands recognition and obedience. Here is a man used to getting his own way, and for one awful moment I see in him the shade of my brother Owen. There are no ghosts here, I tell myself. There are no fingers to point at you. I swallow, and breathe deeply, trying to slow the sudden tempo of my heartbeat.

“I’m Harun,” he says. “The dandy over there is Isidro-”

“Watch it,” says the bat. The vampire.

“-and you must be the Lady Pelim Felicita,” Harun continues smoothly.

“A pleasure to finally meet you,” I say, picking my way through the social traps he’s laid. He will try and make me remember my fall from grace, without actually saying anything outright. It’s the way of Houses, after all, and I have been trained in it. But running to MallenIve has also given me a kind of freedom and sometimes I find it a better hand to play if I acknowledge my fall, rub it in their faces and see what they do then. I eye the room. No sign of any slavering hounds, at least. “Just Felicita will do.”

“Of course it will,” says Isidro. He stalks out from the shadows.

Next to me, I feel Jannik straighten. I can hardly blame him. Isidro is one of those rare creatures born to physical perfection. While he has the same ink hair and milk skin and indigo eyes of all of the vampires, he has none of Jannik’s hard lines and clumsy edges. He looks like a portrait in a book of romance poems; impossible, regal, and smugly aware of his unlikely beauty, his hair parted modishly to the side. If Isidro were a Lammer there would be paintings of him in the galleries and people would whisper his name in the dark. He would command a kind of minor celebrity for the simple accident of having been born. But he is not. MallenIve will never know this bauble.

Isidro smiles at me, and I clench my fingers. Here is someone not to trust. I have no faith in pretty things. That foolishness has long since been knocked out of me.

“And you,” he says, staring not at me, but at Jannik. “I suppose we should be honoured.” His smile is very cold, very practised. “Do you want me on one knee or both?”

“Leave it, Isidro.” Harun looks bored by our presence. “I believe there are drinks in the next room.”

The vampire goes silent, although he doesn’t stop staring at Jannik with a barely-concealed dislike. I’d go so far as to say that his glare borders on outright hatred. It is the only thing that mars his otherwise porcelain fragility and makes him seem real.

I tug Jannik closer to me. “My,” I skirt the word husband, “partner, Pelim Jannik.”

“Sandwalker,” says Isidro.

“Not any more.” Jannik spits the words out, flashing temper that is very unlike him. I have no explanation for his anger, except the cold thought that perhaps it isn’t anger, not really. It crosses my mind that this is some brittle flirtation begun right before Harun and myself, until I remember how the various vampire Houses interact. Perhaps there has been some squabble between Isidro’s House – whatever it may be – and House Sandwalker. Jannik’s magic is crawling up and down the walls and making my skin itch. Seems I’m hardly going to escape the tangled web of the vampire hierarchy here, even if I thought I would. We might be far from his mother’s presence but that doesn’t mean she can’t affect us.

Drinks are waiting for us in the next room and a serving Hob pours out glasses of white wine. The taste is crisp as biting into little sour apples. We all eye each other, hiding our awkwardness with hesitant sips.

“So, Felicita,” Harun says, “I must admit that when House Sandwalker requested that we entertain the two of you, I had no idea of what to expect.” He turns the stem of the glass carefully between his fingers. “I have very little interest in House affairs. I had to look you up.” This is a lie. He would have to be deaf, blind, and a fool to boot, to not know who I am. Of all the Houses of our people, my family is the oldest. And I have brought the name back a certain notoriety. The girl who ran away, tongues wag. The girl who killed her brother, they whisper when they think I cannot hear them.

I will not allow this man to get under my skin. Every movement he makes is a slap, and I can see my brother’s face with its look of shock and confusion and the little scratch under his eye – the boggert-mark I left on him that condemned him to death. The memory of Owen makes me want to vomit. Instead, I stare at Harun, forcing myself to see him as he is. I take his features apart one by one and build up a face that will override my memories.

“Read anything interesting?” I say.

He laughs. “Perhaps. A girl who rose from the dead hours after her only brother was taken by a sea-witch. You must agree it’s a tale that reeks of the fancies of crakes.”

Gris only knows what the poet caste have stirred up with their pretty little lies. Crakes – deluded madmen, all of them, and I refuse to read their verses and epics. Not least because they’re invariably dreadful. “I had nothing to do with my brother’s misfortune,” I say in clipped tones.

“No one said you did.”

I take a quick swallow of my wine and taste almonds and hay, the faintest sour sweetness of gooseberries. There are days when losing myself to an alcoholic stupor seems most appealing. I think this is going to be one of them. Already the wine seems warmer and less like acid eating into my throat.

“And now here you are.” Harun tilts his glass slightly to indicate Jannik at my side. “Both of you. Frankly, I’m surprised that you’re accepted in polite society.”

“He isn’t.” I have no time for House games, this fencing with words, so sharp and slender. “I am. I go where I choose. MallenIve princes are not my masters. Why should I fear them?” After all, I did not have to buy my partner, not like Harun. Jannik was born free. It did not take three pieces of silver to make him a person.

Harun glances across at Isidro, and smiles thinly. “That’s what you said I should have done – carried on as if you didn’t exist.”

“And I still think you’re a fool not to.” The vampire crosses his arms. The movement is graceful and controlled. “Better than both of us being holed up here.”

The two stare at each other, and I have the impression that this is an old war, fought now only in silences and remembered attacks. Harun jerks his hand, indicating an end to the private battle, just as a servant enters the room to announce dinner.

Thank Gris the meal is intended only for Harun and me. I confess I had worried rather that there would be a nilly at the table for blood-letting. I know what Jannik is, but that doesn’t mean I like to be reminded of it.

There’s nothing of the sort. The meal is bloodless. While we eat, the two vampires sip politely at their wine, and occasionally snipe at each other.

“You’ve heard that the Hob-plague has reached the outskirts of the city,” Harun says, as he slices into a fatty duck served in orange and fig. Either he really has no social graces whatsoever, or he thinks to show me up for a simpering milksop while he discusses death at the dinner table.

“The black lung,” I say. “I admit I did not realize it was such a problem here.” I smile at him. “My father died of it. Caught it off some Hob kitty-girl, I believe.” There. I can be crass too, you little bastard. I spear a morsel of duck and chew it, watching him.

“Fascinating,” Harun says.

Finally the servants clear the last of the dessert dishes. I will the evening to draw to an end; will the hands on the clocks to spin faster. My stomach is in knots and my fingers are beginning to tremble. Throughout the many courses, we have made small, meaningless talk about what I think of MallenIve, or about the weather, or what crops are doing well, or the new shade of silk this season. We have made pointed and vicious observations, but nothing that can be considered a real and honest conversation.

This dinner is not about wit or social niceties. It’s about the inescapable fact that in the whole of this vast ugly city there are exactly two marriages between vampires and Lammers. So, for this reason alone, we are meant to pretend friendship. Or approximate something like it. I think it’s what we expect of each other, but I do not see how it will work. Isidro is bitter, and he is cold and exact to Jannik, speaking to him only if he absolutely must. Harun is a typical House male, with all the thick-headed stubbornness that implies.

Jannik and I exchange many a wary and exasperated glance over the course of the meal. Finally, we make our escape, and flee into the sharpness of the winter night.

“What exactly,” I say to Jannik when we’re safely in the carriage on the route back to the Pelim apartments, “was that horrifying evening all about? And how do you know the – Isidro?”

He leans back. “I don’t.” The magic around him is thick, making the air almost unbreathable.

“Well, he certainly seemed to know you.”

“My family,” Jannik corrects. “He knows my family.”

“You told me something about your family once – about your grandmother?”

“Great-grandmother.”

I look up at him, I’ve been idly flicking at my hideous skirt, willing it to disappear, or become less . . . flouncy. “You’re awfully snippy this evening. Have I done something to you?”

“No.” Jannik has his third eyelids down, and he looks through me, past me. “You’ve done nothing.”

His mood is souring my already grim outlook on this forced friendship his mother wants us to cultivate. I don’t like games. I don’t like people who lie to me, who keep things hidden and expect me to accept manipulation as my due. With a snort, I pull my shawl close about my shoulders and stare out at the window instead.

Stupid Jannik. I don’t know what he wants of me.

A Novel Adventure

I’m very excited about the next Patreon project. I’ll be serialising my Hobverse novel House of Sand and Secrets on the blog and here. For those who haven’t read When the Sea is Rising Red, that’s not a huge obstacle. House of Sand and Secrets was written to stand-alone, and though I think having the knowledge of the world and events in When the Sea is Rising Red does make the reading a richer experience, it’s not essential.

I’ll start with Chapter One on Wednesday, and post every Wednesday after that.

My special thanks to the wonderful crew of readers who beta-read, critiqued, cheered me on, and generally helped beat the novel into shape. But most of all, to Brianna at Folded Wherry, without whom House of Sand and Secrets would probably never have left the dusty confines of an abandoned folder. Thank you, darling, you are a Very Special Potato Indeed.

So if you’re into House factions pitted against each other, underhand dealings, people in complicated marriages, magic, drugs, vampire-murder, cities built on magical fault lines, or just generally want to know what happens to Felicita now that she’s had to move on to a new life after murdering people, read on.

And now, as a wee teaser, the opening lines.

The city stinks of death. High summer has MallenIve by the throat and my apartments in the House Pelim holdings are stuffy and humid. We are miles from the Hob slums where a plague is currently raging, and still the air reeks of burned skin from the pyres.

Hardly an auspicious start to the season’s round of parties.

VIRAL GUESTS

Meet Toby Bennet and Benjamin Knox. Two sick sick sick little puppies who make weird and twisted horror stories. They’re here to talk abut writing as a collaborative process, and how it spurred, whipped, and beat them into writing better. Welcome to The Hypnogog, puppies, have at it:

Well it seems that I have bumped up against one of the fundamental laws of our rapidly expanding universe, i.e. that it is often easier to write a four part serialised novel than it is to blog about it!

However, it really doesn’t do to be timid in an age of self-promotion where the squeakiest wheel slurps up the grease with the abandon of a Sumo wrestler preparing for a big match, so here goes.

The project I want to talk to you about is called Viral, but let’s not dwell on the details, what I would like to share is what makes the books special to me and the lessons I have learned from writing them.

The first thing you should know is that Viral is a collaborative work—a few years back fate (or at least persistent random chance) made me aware of a gent by the name of Benjamin Knox.

That’s me!

Like me, Ben had been at the writing game for a while and we decided that a collaboration might mean doing half the work we usually did—so being inherently lazy we started the ball rolling on that basis.

Lazy-writer teamwork activate!

Except it didn’t work as we had expected at all!

*GASP*

Until I started working with Ben, I would have told you that writing was a lonely endeavour best left to lightening troubled nights and the intermittent flickerings of a guttering candle as the wind howls through your crumbling garret. What I found out was that, as with music, collaboration can change everything—I suppose that should have been obvious from watching any Frankenstein movie, though which of us is the hunchbacked assistant is still hotly debated.

What started as a vaguely cynical plan to “get a novel out” quickly broadened and deepened into a project that went places I had never imagined—a work that became more than the sum of its parts.

Naturally, I leave it to everyone to decide for themselves what they think of Viral, my real focus here is on how the experience of working with another writer was so much more valuable than I’d ever thought it would be.

For me something clicked and I found myself working with all the controlled abandon of the duelling banjos from Deliverance.

In retrospect it makes perfect sense that working with another writer makes you up your game—each time you sit down to write a scene you imagine how they will enjoy it and better still you know that your partner will likely add more details that you might not even have thought of making the story fuller and always fresh. There is never a moment where you can think “Oh well no one will notice this” because you know any slacking will be spotted (Ben is not above cracking the whip!)

Write gooder, damn you! More adjectives!

As effusive as I might sound about Viral it is this process of collaboration that I think I will value most. I certainly feel that it has been a developmental experience and yes, damn it I am proud of what we have made.

I could tell you a lot of things about it; that Viral is the distilled experiences of two devoted Sci-Fi / Horror fans. That we wrote it to have one foot firmly in pulp and at least a toe in the mire of literature, we took what we knew and played with it, together, making something that was at least pleasing to us and with any luck will be pleasing to others.

I could claim that “if you only read one book this year it should be…” but none of that particularly matters. The bottom line is that… I’ve managed to write over six hundred words here and that must surely constitute a respectable blog post? (Ben get some pictures together and let’s get on with the next season of Viral).

—Toby Bennett

& Benjamin Knox

***

Viral is a four part cyberpunk action-horror extravaganza from the Crossroads Press imprint Macabre Ink and has been described as “AKIRA meets Resident Evil” and “Ghost in the Shell meets The Strain”.

Find out if they’re right.

Or if you’re unsure why not try VIRAL: Rough Cuts, a set of prelude and tie-in stories set before the events of book 1 Raw Feed.

***

Rogue author Benjamin Knox is best known for his short pulp horror fiction. He has been published in numerous anthologies including Suspended in Dusk and several of the Bloody Parchment collections, and continues his short-form fiction with such monstrosities as the Dead of Winter stories and the forthcoming creature-feature novella PRIMORDIAL.

For further strangeness visit:

www.benjaminknox.net

and/or for a stream of visual weirdness:

http://pulpocalypse.tumblr.com/

 

 

Toby Bennett is a veteran fantasy and sci-fi author with over eight novels to his name, including the continual reader favourite Heaven’s Gate. He lives and bleeds in Cape Town, South Africa. You can find out more about him and his work at www.thedragontower.co.za

Through the Black and Back Again

Through the Black and Back Again;

A Story of Oreyn

by

Cat Hellisen

#

Now this happened before the high-Lammers started using unicorn horns like scriv to help their magic along, before they thought they might be able to do the same to the vamps, and grind up their bones like magic dust. And don’t ask me how they get these fool notions anywise, because there’s no answer to that better than, “they’re a bunch of coves, gentry or no.”

This is back when some people were still calling the unicorns by their old Hob name, before the Lammers made it a word you get burned over. They stole the word from us, like they did the rest of our language, and soon hardly no one would even remember that once the unicorns had two horns and were called taji. Back then the Lammers were still working on killing everything about us, from root to branch, burning out our natural magic while their own stinking Lammer-magic fallout was still settling uneasy over the land, and the taji with only one horn were nowt more than inbred sports. They were kept alive because the gentry-dells fancied that having their coaches drawn by a unicorn was somehow better than having goats like any normal person.

So there was this fashion, and the two-horned taji are served up in stews until only the sports are left. Bad tempered ones at that, natural, and it’s always some poor Hobling who gets the unlucky honor of herding the one-horned taji into the fields out behind the Tooth.

But this is all long after Erina Mallen went and ended her family line by opening the Well, and while the fallout was worst over MallenIve (and they deserved it, the fuckers) mostly down here by the coast we were so far from the heart of it that it hardly mattered, and anywise, the wind off the ocean kept the air clean, doctoring the land as good as any old woman with herbs and poultices.

You get the idea. MallenIve’s little mess barely touched us. And wherry Hobs stopped telling their tales about all the empty ships that litter the red dunes out around MallenIve proper, and we forgot that there was a war, and a terrible weapon. We forgot that the Lammers changed us too.

Here then is a story from before, so that we will not forget again:

Nikalli is too old to be tending herd. Normally that’s a job given to Hoblings, and to boys at that. But Nikalli is smaller than she should be, and too quiet and queerwise. Some say she’s scriv-addled, that her ma drank too much bitter while she was carrying her. But mostly, the other Hobs just accept that sometimes there are ones born slow and quiet and small and different, and they leave her alone.

The really old Hobs—the ones who remember the stories, who even speak them sometimes, whispering them to each other in the old tongue—soft as rushes in the vlei—they know what Nikalli is, and they grieve, because if the Lammers find her out, they will kill her quick as they’d kill a rabbit.

No one listens to the talk of old people.

So Nikalli spends her days far from Stilt City and the rustle-splash and wheek and reek of the vleis. Instead she is up on the cliff-side, with the ugly taji, with their stupid lonely horns, with the bird-calls and the wind. She is waiting for the burning she knows is coming, though she is pretending she’s not.

Sometimes she can pretend that she does not see the things she cannot change. This way, she can claim a little innocence for herself, wash herself clean. Today she can cnvince herselfthat she cannot see what is coming, that she can do nothing to change the course of the river. Today she keeps her thoughts on small things, like the stupidity of goats with one horn.

“Unicorn,” she says to the one that is pushing its head against her side. She runs her fingers down the gray and black ribbon-curl of the vast horn. This is what the Lammer-ladies want them to be called, like ancient beasties from the myths and legends of a world they can’t hardly remember. The unicorn bleats, and stares with its slitted yellow eyes. It seems to hardly ever blink.

The word sounds tiny and unreal. “Unicorn,” she says again, louder, as if to make the mountains and the hills and the forests agree. The beast grows bored with the paltry conversation, and wanders back to the rest of the herd. It has already eaten the crumbs of Nikalli’s lunch, and chewed the hem of her raw-silk dress ragged.

The sun is red and low, and the midges whine in clouds about her. The unicorns cropping the salty grass are flicking their tails. It’ll soon be time to take them back to the ken, and to let the serving mistress set her some new task before nightfall. Nikalli clicks her tongue against her teeth, and the unicorns flick their tails harder and pretend not to hear her.

“Stupid,” she says to them, or herself, shaking her head as she trots closer to them. She clicks again, then follows it with a piercing whistle. The unicorns raise their heads. The whistle means come on let’s go there’s mash grains and vegetable peelings to eat if you’ll just follow me kenwise because the only language unicorns understand begins with the growl of the belly and ends with the chomp of teeth. The herd stalks toward her, in that peculiar queer way of goats, where sometimes a Hob is left wondering if the unicorns might not actually prefer the taste of meat, and are just choosing to eat everything else for now.

Nikalli counts them off under her breath, even though she already knows she’s one short. This is the problem – that she knows things. And the things are always true, and they are almost always things she don’t want to know. She counts again. Still short. Nikalli whistles louder this time, like a shriek of a hunting bird.

And there; a crackle of branches, a shadow coming from the edge of the forest where the bushes are low and thick and the trees are fewer. Behind that, the Forest Deep rises, and no one goes in there if they can avoid it. She waits for the unicorn, fat on forest lily bulbs, to come out.

The shape’s all wrong; too tall, too thin. Nikalli shades her eyes.

No stupid lost unicorn, this one. Oh no, not at all. It’s a boy, older than her, old enough to be married already and working his hands down to nothing, and growing bent and broken before he should.

“You’ve lost a taji,” he says and slips his hands into his pockets. He walks right up to her, stops and waits.

“Unicorn.” The Lammers won’t take kind to hearing that other word, that old word.

“Whatever, your fucking goat.” He nods back at the forest. “She’s in there. Won’t follow me out, stubborn thing, and I can’t get close enough to catch her.”

“You were in the forest.” Nikalli touches her hands to her head, to try and stop knowing things she shouldn’t. She makes her voice small as a dovemouse, little and gray and unnoticed. Her head hurts.

“Yeah,” the boy says, and he squints at her. “That a crime? Some mucking House Lammer going to come and throw me in iron for it?”

She shakes her head. “The forest is sick.”

“Oh—it’s that, is it?” He smiles nastily and looks back over his shoulder, once, quickly. “You think you’re safe because you stay out of the woods and stick to the shore like little limpets. The fallout will get you anywise, you know.” He takes a step closer to her, and drops his voice all conversational. “You still drink from the Casabi. Pelimburg idiots.”

And that proves what she already knows; that he’s a MallenIve Hob, that he’s no servant, that his name is Davin Tomis, and that he’s come down to Pelimburg because he knows too.

“That’s right,” he says. “And there’s ill times coming.”

“Stow it,” she says, but the words are small because it’s why she’s up here later than she should be, because she doesn’t want to smell the burning. Smell the way it will come across Stilt City and swallow up homes and families like fire eating the wheat stubble after the harvest, leaving the ground clean and black.

This is her curse, to know, and to know she can do nothing.

“The worst of it will be over now,” Davin says. “You can look.”

Nikalli leaves the unicorns behind and walks across the meadows and fields to where the stone kens of the Great Houses squat. She follows a little bridle path that winds its way to the cliff face. Even before she reaches Pelim’s Leap, she can see the clouds roiling off the distant spur of land across Pelimburg’s harbour.

The wind has to change yet. For now, the smoke from the fires is spreading out across the sea. A strange queer storm, it will blow itself out over the water and rain soot and ash over the green glass ripples.

Even though the knowing was already in her head, the it punches her like a ruffian-cove’s fist in a street-fight. Tears stick in her throat like gluey salt porridge. Nikalli makes her hands into small fists and tucks them into the pockets of her overskirt. She lets the wind that rush-tumbles about the cliff edge sting her eyes all deep desert dry.

“There was nowt you could do,” Davin says, and claps one hand on her shoulder. “You can’t stay here now, anywise. That’s why I came to fetch you.”

It’s because of her. Or the others like her. Why only some of the Hobs have turned queer under the falling taint of the wild magic Erina Mallen released, she don’t right know. It don’t matter matter in the end. What matters is that they are not allowed, death-sentenced by the high-Lammers, and hunted down, flushed out.

Burnt out.

This is what they’ve done today, and she had no words big enough to warn her family, her people. “I need to go back,” she says.

“For what? You’ll just make yourself sick and sorry.”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“You know well as I do that it’s not part of the story, you don’t go back.” He waits, tightening his fingers on her shoulder, and Nikalli is grateful because it helps. It hurts, and it keeps her standing. “I dunno how far ahead you see, but by now you should know that we leave, we head upriver. There’s a wherry we catch.”

She shakes off his hand, and turns away to follow the bridle track down the slopes toward the town. It’s a long walk to Stilt City, through the two halves of Pelimburg, over the Casabi River, and she knows she don’t have time nor future to waste, but she’s going anyway.

The unicorns can find their own way home now. Or not. It don’t matter.

By the time the pair of them reach the vleis of Stilt City, the winds have turned and the air smells of burning. Meat and wood, hair and reeds, and over it all the marshy reek of still water and sewer waste. The air is full of wailing, and the sounds sob higher and lower, in time with the gusts that rattle loose roofs and slam broken doors.

Nikalli leaves the other Hobs to their misery, cat-stepping neat between them and making her way to her own ken. Her parents are dead, her cabin-ken on its stilts nothing more than a charred-out hovel. The wooden platform creaks when she puts a foot on to it.

“This is a stupid idea,” Davin says from behind her. He’s stayed on the bridge pathway.

Nikalli says nothing. They are dead, but she still wants to see them, to give them some kind of goodbye. This shape, this is her da. She can’t even cover his body. It’s this that makes the bubble of sticky tears burp up from where she has been keeping it down. She sobs. Standing alone in her ruined house, her face washed dirty. She makes ugly noises, she chokes. She jams her fists in her eyes and presses them into the softness there as if this will bring her da back.

Shaky and empty, she lowers her hands and makes herself look again. There, curled in one corner is another body. This must be her da’s wife. Her own mam went addled years ago, after the war. She spoke to no one, wore no clothes, and finally one day she walked out and left.

Her da remarried a while later, and along came Nikalli’s sister.

There should be another corpse, smaller than the others. Perhaps she is burnt into one shape, melded back with her dam. Nikalli walks closer to check, but her step-mam’s corpse is lonely as all dead things.

“Help me,” she says, looking back at where Davin waits.

He shakes his head. “Don’t go bring more heartache on yourself. Dead is dead, and we’ve a wherry to catch.”

“No.” Nikalli walks out the ruined house and to the edge of the platform. She looks over the edge at the waving reeds and the silvery black water, filled with tiny midgefish and the hidden sounds of birds. “Merrow!” It is not the loudest her voice will go, and it is a scratchy shout, hardly used.

There is no answer. “Merrow!” Louder this time, with force, with the need to make it true.

And then.

A sound a sob a squeak a something that could be her sister’s terror and the world remakes itself.

“You can’t do this.” Davin makes no move to help, and Nikalli supposes he cannot, that the things he knows stand too much in his way.

She don’t bother answering, just lowers herself over the edge and drops into muddy water that splashes up to her thighs. “Merrow?” she says again, softer.

“Nikki,” says a little voice, a voice that has lost everything before it even got the chance to know what it had. Her half-sister is curled up, wet and black with mud and soot, on a floating mess of reeds and weeds.

Nikalli lifts her and wades to the bridge path. She holds the girl up, and, sighing and scowling all the while, Davin takes her and then holds out a hand to help Nikalli from the vlei.

“Wait here,” Nikalli tells Merrow. Her ken is in ruins and there will be no chance of retrieving neither hers or Merrow’s wrapping blanket—the first birth gift of all Hoblings—so she steals one from an abandoned home, whispering sorries to the walls.

She sets Merrow on her hip, and winds the long silk wrap about them both, knotting it over her chest, tying her half-sister close to her. The material is dyed red, and under the reek of smoke there is still the must of raw silk and the dry whispery smell of the herbs from the packing crate. The smell of safety and family – the first thing a Hobling learns in its cradle.

“We can’t waste more time,” Davin says. “I’m walking blind here.”

Somehow the wherry is waiting, no Sharif see them board, and the wherry Hobs of The Flying Fox welcome them, take their coin and ask no questions.

The trip passes numb, and Nikalli’s words grow smaller, and lodge like little stones in her throat, sand in her eyes. She rocks Merrow, and does not answer her childish questions.

“You fucked up,” Davin says. Nikalli is sitting with Merrow near the head of the wherry, watching the water slide brown and gold around them while she combs and braids Merrow’s hair. She does not look up at him.

“Don’t blame yourself for the fire,” he says, and sits down. “That weren’t to do with you. They weren’t out hunting you, but some dreambringer.”

Nikalli nods. A dreambringer with nightmares caught in its hair, a monster that destroys everything it touches. How is she any better? She could see the future coming, even if she didn’t make it happen. She knows this, she also knows that soon the Sharif would have come looking for her, and then the next fires would be her fault.

“You still fucked up, though.” He jerks his thumb at Merrow. “Going back for her. You changed the order and now I can’t see for shit. The future’s gone all black.”

And there’s the problem with knowing the future the way they do. High-Lammer Saints see a million and one paths to take to reach the future – dreams and visions. But people like them, Davin and Nikalli, it’s not like that at all. There’s no choice, no wrong paths or harder ones. It’s more like they have better eyesight than everyone else, so they see further. They can’t change what they see. Just know.

“I’m off in the black,” Davin says, not caring that Nikalli says nothing. “I’m hoping if we carry on as if nowt happened, we’ll get back on the future.” He sniffs, then stands. “We’re going to hop off at Little Bridgeton, and we’ll be there in half a day. So get yourself ready.”

Nikalli pauses in her braiding and looks up. “We’re not going to MallenIve?”

“Not bloody likely.” Davin squints. “How far ahead do you see? Normal-like, I mean.”

“Not far.” And now not even that. Like Davin says, they’ve been shut into darkness, just putting one foot ahead of the other and hoping they don’t fall off the cliff-edge, but Nikalli don’t care. She’d give up her future again, glad as can be, just to save Merrow. There was no way she could have left her.

Little Bridgeton is a bare scraping of a village, set in the crook where Dryriver meets the Casabi.

The Dryriver is wide and brown like the Casabi, but shallower still, and little wooded islands cut through it. The sides are thick with low bushes, dark green against the flat brown plains that stretch off to the east.

Overhead the sky has gone black and yellow even though it’s barely midday.

“Storm’s coming,” Davin says. “We’ll hole up til it’s over, get supplies, and leave in the morning.” He nods at the river as they walk away from the dock, through the dusty red roads. “It’s full now, rainy season, you know. Come winter it’s just sand and shrubs. Dry as bones. Just shows the brains of your high-Lammers—calling it Dryriver.” He snorts.

“Does it have another name?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. An old name, but I don’t know it.” He sounds angry with himself about his lack of knowledge. This is what the Lammers have done to us, torn out the roots of our culture, stamped it out, burned it out; they have destroyed our tongues and memories.

The sky rumbles, making Nikalli jump. Merrow burrows her head against Nikalli’s shoulder and starts whimpering.

“It won’t do you no real harm.” Davin grins. “A bang and a flash and a bit of a growl. It’s pretty, like firecrackers on Long Night.”

Nikalli don’t believe him, but even as the first fat rain drops begin to patter down into the dust, turning the roads to red mud, Davin is leading them to an inn. It’s called the The Hare’s Rest and inside it’s dry and stuffy and smells of tobacco and poisonink and tea and beer and people. They rent a small room. “You sit tight here,” Davin says. “Order food.”

And then he’s gone.

“Where’s mam?” Merrow asks as Nikalli sets her on the bed. “When we seeing her?”

“Your mam’s busy,” Nikalli whispers and strips the travel-grimed clothes off the Hobling. “She told me to watch you.” She wraps the little girl in a blanket from the bed and goes to wash the clothes.

Davin doesn’t come back til morning. “Rise and shine, sweethearts,” he says. “We’ve a nilly and a cart, and were leaving.” Nillies are cheaper than unicorns, because the Lammers have cut off their horns. They use them like trophies, or grind them to dust and put them in their stir-porridge. Something like that. Even so, a nilly will cost a fair bag of coin.

Nikalli wonders where Davin’s money comes from. Is he striking from the shopkeepers, pilfering bags of coin from gentry? Might be that it’s not her magic that will get her killed, but something as stupid as being caught as the associate of some light-fingered ruffian-cove. She sighs. It’s not as though there’s a home for her to go back to. Instead she sits quiet and waits until the cart is well-loaded. “Where are we going?” There’s enough food and leathers of water to last days, if not weeks.

“Place I know.”

Nikalli chews at her lip, irritated, but gets up on the cart, and hugs Merrow close. Davin clicks at the nilly, which tries to bite him before finally ambling off. Davin walks casual as can be alongside, with a willow switch in hands, whistling, and swishing at the caked mud.

The journey east seems to go on longer than forever. They pass a few small villages, nothing more than a huddle of white-washed stone huts and a well-point, where Davin refills their water sacks and trades for vegetables, but that soon dwindles to the rare farm.

The farmers are dark, weather-beaten, stooped. They watch the travelers with wary eyes, their dogs growling on strained leashes.

Nikalli finds herself missing even these unfriendly coves. They are in an endless land of Hob-high grass, red soil, scrubby trees, and empty sky. She feels smaller than a froglet in a salt pan, and as out of place. “This place we’re going?” she says as Davin brings the nilly to a halt.

“What about it?”

“I should know about it, shouldn’t I?”

Davin shrugs. “By now. Everything still black for you?”

Nikalli glances at Merrow, asleep in her wrap, and nods.

“Shite and buggery.” He lets the nilly off to graze, not bothering to hobble it. Here in the wilds, it will stay close. They’ve seen herds of buck which stare at them and chew thoughtful as old men, but no lion or the smaller spotted lioncats.

And no spyhnx.

Nothing out of the ordinary at all. “Did the fallout not blow here?” Fallout. It is a Lammer word, but it will do. The Hobs have never had a word for this thing the Lammers brought with them, with their wars. Nikalli steps down to help with setting up their small camp, and she starts by gathering all the sticks she can find. Fire is their first defense.

Davin shrugs. “We’ve not seen much sign of it out here. But it has come down. Just didn’t take, like seeds in bad soil.” He stands up straight, and taps at the side of his nose. “Magic follows river courses, and we’re in the dry.”

She has no idea how he knows that, but somehow she believes him. It sits right in her head, like discovering a truth.

“Nothing here other than a couple of seasonal rivers.” He points further to the east. “We’ll hit the valleys and foothills soon enough, and then we’ll find the Reaper. Once we’re there, we’re home free. Just about.”

Reaper. She knows the name, but only from tales. It is a river so far to the east that it is not real. Is that how far they have gone? She shivers, feeling her heart stretched like a rope between two posts. She’s bothered by home free. Home is where you lay your head to sleep, Nikalli remembers hearing the older Hobs say, but it’s more than that. It’s family and friends and safety. She shakes her head and doesn’t bother to tell Davin.

That night, she hears the coughing roar of lions and cannot sleep. She opens her eyes and waits for the shadows to turn into shapes. Davin is sitting watch by the fire, his face more tired than she has seen it, his eyes shiny in the firelight. And then she feels it, like waking up early in the dark and watching how the light seems to fade in, sneaky as a hunting cat. And she almost knows. “We need to pack up now,” she whispers, so as not to wake Merrow who is sleeping warm against her.

Davin nods slowly. “Seems like.”

It’s several days later before they finally reach the banks of the Reaper. The land has changed, grown greener and hotter, and Nikalli’s clothes are pasted to her skin with sweat and grime. Merrow cries all the time, a broken-hearted sob. “Mam,” she says, over and over, and Nikalli can do nothing but jig her up and down, even though her arms ache from the weight of the child.

She gets down from the cart. “Come, Merrow-my-love, it’s a river. A proper one.” And she can feel the magic pulsing underneath it. Strange that her whole life she has grown up with the throb of wild magic underfoot and never noticed. It’s only after trekking through the drylands that she has felt the difference. Each step across the dry pulled at her, weighed her body down. Now she is like a dandelion seed, and she feels certain she could rise with a gust of wind.

“It’s good, yeah?” says Davin, catching her eye. He’s smiling, and the strained look is gone from his face. “We’ll need to ford, but we’ve built a bridge further down.”

There are dark boulders in the mud-coloured water, and one of them moves, raising its huge head, flicking tiny ears. “Oh!” Nikalli presses one hand to her mouth. “Riverhorses-”

“No.” Davin scowls. “We better move. Them’s nixes.”

The riverhorses have been changed, turned magical and carnivorous by the fallout. Nikalli has heard stories of how they will drag a man screaming into the water, and eat him live, tearing chunks of meat from his bones while the water turns red all about him. Her heart skips, and her skin goes fever-clammy. Nikalli keeps a tight grip on Merrow’s arm, and pulls her away from the scrubby bank.

“They move fast,” Davin adds. “On water and land.”

Nikalli shivers, and herds Merrow back to the cart, high up and away from the ground. She wants to be as far from this magic-tainted herd of nixes.

The nilly pulling their little cart is tired and hoof-sore, and they travel slowly. There’s a path now that runs along the river, and that makes the going easier, but Nikalli knows that Davin is scared, and she knows why. The nixes are following. They’re not chasing them, not yet, just ambling downriver, keeping their distance and watching with their black eyes. Even the nilly is spooked, and it’s about as magical as a handkerchief.

“We set up camp as far from the river as we can,” Davin says. They’re both of them uncertain, their future is still gray, dark in patches. While Nikalli is glad to not know if this is the hour of her death, she is also scared by that. Sometimes knowing what’s to come is all that gets a body through it.

Night falls, warm and black and loud. Frogs and crickets boom and twitter and trill and chirp and buzz and shriek. Nikalli sits shivering by the fire, even though she is not cold. Merrow sleeps fitful, sobbing and restless. She’s feverish now, calling for water and for her dam in her sleep. All Nikalli can do is dampen cloths from the water sacks and lay them against Merrow’s skin, give her little sips to soothe her.

All around them, the future grays and shifts. Every crack of a twig, every sighing rush of moving grass makes both Davin and Nikalli jumpy.

“Are they coming?” she asks. The future is grey, looming. Something ill is coming her way, but she cannot see the shape of it.

“I don’t kn—I think…” he falls silent, and around them the night crackles.

Grass swishes on the edge of the little clearing they have made, and Davin gets to his feet, a bronze knife in his hands. It glints wicked in the fire light. In a flick of a mouse ear, Nikalli has Merrow in her arms. The girl doesn’t wake, still talking in dream-fevers.

A face peers at them. A round face, girlish, dark and brown as the Casabi in summer. The girl’s eyes are ivory. “You,” she says to Davin. “Fool.”

Davin slumps his shoulders, breathes out a long sigh. “Shite, you had me thinking there was nixes coming.”

“They are,” she snaps. “Move!”

Nikalli snaps her arms tighter around Merrow. They leave everything; the fire, the cart, the nilly. The dark girl flits through the tangled bushes that lead down to the river-bank, darting sure foot and Davin follows her, huffing and crashing. Nikalli can feel his terror, and adds her own as she stumbles after him. Merrow is milling-stone heavy, weighing her down and making her slow.

They’re heading to the river.

The girl stops on the bank, and hangs on to a branch of a nearby bush to stop herself from falling into the black waters. “Tell her,” she says to Davin.

“We need to cross,” he says.

“I see.” She doesn’t really. The nixes can swim better than they can. Distantly she can hear crashing as the nixes barrel through the undergrowth. They run faster than she thought they could.

“Once we’re on the other side, there are safe places we can hole up until the bastards give way.” He’s jabbering, speaking so fast the words slide into each other. “But you have to tell the river your sins.”

“What?”

“You can’t get in the water dirty—just—just watch me.”

The girl is already speaking to the water in a language liquid and dark. It bounds and clicks against stones, trills and ripples. Then she dives in with a seal’s grace and barely a splash.

Davin slides closer to the bank. “Three stolen nillies, a handful of brass from a purse, and—and—oh fuck, an apple or summat. I can’t remember.” And with that he lets go and splashes loud.

Nikalli can just make out the two dark heads bobbing in the moonlit water. With a deep breath, she hoists Merrow higher and truly looks at her for the first time since she hauled her out away from that burned-out ken. She sees her da’s liquid brown eyes in Merrow’s thin little face, his heavy dark brows, her step-ma’s narrow nose and small sweet mouth. Nikalli looks on her sister-half, and knows that Merrow is all she has left of her family.

She says to the river, “I let my family die,” and careful as she can, with one hand still holding on to the branch she eases herself into the water.

It’s not cold, and not warm. The river feels like sea-silk and smells of fish and pondweeds. Her feet sink, and mud oozes between her toes.

The nixes burst through the bush and tumble to the river banks, their massive jaws open, ivory teeth glinting.

Nikalli strikes out, swimming in a one-armed dog-paddle. Merrow’s head keeps slipping under the water. She can’t look back, not even for a second.

The nixes are waiting on the river bank, not following. Somehow, this is worse still. What is in the water that even nixes are scared to follow her across? Something touches her leg, brushes it, and Nikalli tries to scream and chokes on river water. Merrow is wide awake now, her eyes frightened, she mewls, her chubby fingers tangled in Nikalli’s hair. She will drown them both.

It’s impossible to swim. Finally, there comes from behind them the sound of the nixes lumbering heavy as boulders into the river, and Nikalli feels her heart go tight and small and then just stop.

There’s no point in trying to swim.

Again, the brush of skin beneath the water, and now something tugs at her heavy clothes, and the waters come rising, or perhaps she is sinking, and then she is dragged under, her hair streaming up like weeds grasping for the surface.

Her eyes are wide open but she can see nothing.

Hands all around her, and Merrow is plucked from her and then she is dragged, faster than she believed possible, through the silty waters, and up up up to the air.

She sputters when her head breaks the surface. She shakes water from her stinging eyes, and coughs up river silt and stomach bile. Her arms are empty and she is on the far bank. Davin reaches a hand out to her. “Come on,” he says. “You’re safe, or near as can be.”

“Merrow.”

“You can’t go back,” he says. “You’ve lost her.”

Nikalli turns, splashing back out toward the middle of the river, but Davin grabs her shoulder and pulls her back. “They’ve got her,” he says. “And they don’t give back what they’ve taken. Leave it be.”

“What—taken?” She tries to shake him off, but Davin is stronger than her, and he hauls her out the river with iron arms.

“Hurry,” says the dark brown girl. “The river spirits are hungry.”

“Look,” Davin says. And there, sleek dark heads are bobbing, their ivory eyes and teeth like seed-pearls glinting in the moonlight. They grin and splash, wide tails flicking water in sprays of silver. The nixes in the water head upriver at their sight. And then they are gone, and only the swimmers are left behind.

“Fish-people,” says Davin in a whisper.

Nikalli has never seen fish-people before, never even knew they existed. They circle the middle of the river, diving one after the other, until finally one surfaces with a bundle in its arms.

“Merrow!” It is only Davin’s grip keeping her back, and kick and bite and struggle as she might, he will not let her go, not for love nor brass.

“You can’t have her,” he says in her ear, holding her tight against his chest, locking her in place and ignoring the blood she’s drawn on his forearm. “But she’s safe, safer than she was, at any road. She’s be right as rain with them, never get ill nor old. They’ll make her well again, as the river changes her.”

The fish-people hold Merrow above the water, and they gather around the soaked bundle, whistling and piping to each other. They stroke her with their webbed hands, smile with fish-sharp teeth.

“We must go,” says the girl, and her voice is full of aches and longing.

“Nikalli?” Davin says it soft in her ear. “Come now, it’ll turn out all right, you’ll see. You can come visit her. Alia will show you.” He points to the dark girl, who sighs and stills. “One of them’s my granddam,” she says.

Nikalli looks back at the river-people, at their fish tails bright and shining under stars, their faces smooth as pebbles, with not a wrinkle to share between them. She has lost Merrow as surely as if she’d left her to starve or drown in the reeds under the old burned ken. She has lost her to magic and to the queerness of the fallout the Lammers brought down on their world. They have taken everything from her, because of magic, one way or another.

She does not think she will want to cross this river again, but if she does she will confess to murder in her heart, that the next Lammer she sees she will put a stone blade through their eyes and watch them bleed out black into the hungry earth.

The future spreads out golden-bright ahead of her, like the coming of lightmans after a long dark night, and she can see clear as new-blown glass the shape of her coming days. There is blood already spilled, and she cannot change it. Or perhaps she will not.

Choosing not to change her future, to walk clear-eyed into what she knows is coming, that is also a choice, Nikalli finally realizes. She turns away from the family she was always meant to lose, and lets Davin lead her into a new world.

And that’s how stories go, always twisting back to the pattern like water finding the paths of old riverbeds. There’s no getting out of it. Lammers have their own fancy word for how stories unroll themselves. They say it’s fate, that it’s their destiny. But what they don’t know is that even if the end of the story stays the same, we can still shape the way we get there, if we’re willing to walk into the dry, far from the river course.

We tell the stories, and we are the stories.

fin

 

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Ghost in the Cogs

Broken Eye Books are releasing an anthology of ghostly steampunk:  “Ghosts. Gaslight. Gears.” as they put it.

It has a great cover that I’m really loving:

And a very cool list of stories:

Siobhan Carroll, “Asmodeus Flight”
Folly Blaine & Randy Henderson, “Hiss”
Jessica Corra, “The Misplaced Body of Fitzhugh Alvey”
Howard Andrew Jones, “The Ghost Pearl”
Emily C. Skaftun, “Frænka Askja’s Silly Old Story”
Elsa S. Henry, “Edge of the Unknown”
Eddy Webb, “The Blood on the Walls”
Nayad Monroe, “Tipping Point”
Jonah Buck, “T-Hex”
Erika Holt, “The Monster”
Wendy Nikel, “The Book of Futures”
Parker Goodreau, “Death Wish”
Christopher Paul Carey, “City of Spirits”
T. Mike McCurley, “Team 17”
Scott Fitzgerald Gray, “The Litany of Waking”
Richard Dansky, “Labor Costs”
Nick Mamatas, “The Twentieth-Century Man”
Spencer Ellsworth, “Clockwork of Sorrow “
Liane Merciel, “Lady in the Ghastlight”
Richard Pett, “Cuckoo”
James Lowder, “The Shadow and the Eye”
Cat Hellisen, “Golden Wing, Silver Eye”

And as you can see I’m in there too, though my story is not Victoriana Steampunk but rather set in the same world as my novel Three Dog Dreaming, where toymakers who infuse clockwork with magic study at the Floating University, and the lotus-city of Pal-em-Rasha is the centre of the world.

Golden Wing, Silver Eye is about roosters, and being in love – with your art, and with your other – and it starts like this….

It is winter in Pal-em-Rasha and all the roosters have been strangled.

I’m quite looking forward to having this anthology in my library, and you can pre-order here on Amazon.