“Well, take a good long look, Granny. I am here for your amusement.” Kali forked the stew up into her mouth, cramming it in as if she had never tasted anything so good. Anything to keep from showing Grizmare true emotion!
“So that’s how it is with you, hmm?” Grizmare rested the tip of her cane on the floor between her open legs and leaned her hands and chin on the handle. “Shall we not talk about what a fuck up you have made of things? Corrupting the datastacks and using High Judge Titian’s own datafeed? Leaving your sticky DNA all over the office? Even having the audacity to just sit and wait around to be found out? What were you thinking, Kali? Were you even thinking?”
Kali forced down the mouthful. “I believe I was thinking clearer than at any other time in my life.” She downed the water from a tin cup that made it taste faintly metallic. “I have seen you in the public gallery. You’ve heard all the evidence, listened to my version of events and the reason why I acted.” She scooted off the bed and came to stand directly opposite Grizmare the other side of the glass-sheet. “The craziest thing, Granny, is that you have always abided the Vary far more than anyone else I know. You have always argued for their fair treatment. It’s just that your voice has never counted, has it? Neither me nor your son ever heard a word you said, not really. You have always been ever so slightly irritating in your opinions, but nothing to take seriously.”
“So you’re going down that route? Attack me first before I can properly attack you. How very Bleek of you!” Grizmare shuffled in her seat and gave a couple of taps with her cane. “Very wise, Kali. Except you misunderstand my visit. I am not here to gloat. I am here to listen.”
“To what? I have nothing new to say.”
“To how you are feeling. To how you really are.” Grizmare took a deep inhale and shuffled again, slightly restless and a little uncomfortable, like an old dog. “What can I do for you, Kali? Really.”
Kali peered through the glass-sheet. Grizmare had always taken pains to raise Kali to be as independent as possible. Her favourite response whenever Kali asked for help or assistance was ‘Learn to stand on your own two feet, child.’
“Am I standing on my own two feet now, Granny?” She held out her arms to the walls of her cell. “I thought I was being reasonable in my personal manifesto. Not confrontational, or anarchic. But just encouraging a little more political wrangling when it came to the Vary. Just encouraging of a little less death.”
“But you have always loved death, Kali. Anytime a thing got in your way in life, you took it out. Remember old Jimney, my favourite maw cat when you were growing up? I know you poisoned him on purpose. And all those swallows shot from your bedroom window? Innocent little things. You loved to string them up on the fence opposite Mister Thatchett’s house. I’d find them all pegged out, wing to wing. Left to rot in the sun.”
Kali couldn’t disagree. She had taken great pleasure in exercising her superior domain over weaker creatures. Ever since she was small, there had been something undeniably pleasurable about holding the power of life and death in her hands. It had made her feel uniquely invincible.
“God-like,” she murmured.
“What’s that?”
She cleared her throat and said louder, “To say whether a person lives or dies, or even whether they are treated humanely and with dignity, or beaten down and broken – it’s a god-like power. It makes you feel as if sunlight itself is flowing through your veins. Like you’ve power over air to breathe, water to drink, even whether another person gets to speak. It’s addictive.”
She heard a small hack of breath in the background behind her grandmother. For the first time, she noticed the eerie figure of a nun, head to toe in black and standing very still and statuesque.
“Granny! You’ve brought your own little piece of religion with you. Are you hoping I’ll atone for my sins? Or do you want me to join the holy order and dedicate my wanton life to Lord Gothendore? Beg him to take me as his bride?”
“Nothing so trite! The nun is with me. She is my paid companion, because none of the rest of you fuckers chose to stick around!”
Kali nodded at the nun. The young woman nodded stiffly in return. She had the most intense, crystalline green eyes, in which Kali caught the slight flare of revulsion. It wasn’t entirely surprising. Kali understood that she was the perfect embodiment of betrayal.
She brought her focus back to Grizmare. “I did enjoy sharing in my father’s vision of a strong and holy Bleekland. But sometimes a person can see something they can never un-see and it can change them. I think, if you will indulge me, Granny, there is a very great difference between hunting sparrows and witnessing mile on mile of trenches filled with the putrefying remains of executed Vary. That, Granny, is a leap too far from humanity, even for a murderer like me. The choice was to stand by and do nothing, or open my eyes and ears and mouth to the suffering. Sometimes, if you want to go on calling yourself a human being, you must stand up and say ‘This Must Stop!’ We are not beasts, we are not monsters, but right this instant, we are behaving like them!”
She waited for Grizmare to offer some quip or fresh attack against her sanity. Only, her grandmother just sat and stared through the glass-sheet. Grizmare’s wrinkled eyes misted.
“I am sorry I cannot help you more, Kali, but I have already used up any influence I might have with my son begging for clemency. You are guilty, of course, mainly of stupidity, but you are still our flesh and blood. For the sake of your mother, I have written and asked your father to take the death sentence off the table. My ideal would be that you are placed under house arrest back with me in Geno. But your father is as stubborn as cat shit on a silk blouse!”
Grizmare might have said more, but the door to the cells opened once more and the guard returned.
“Who says time’s up?” Grizmare had snapped, turning to the guard and holding up her cane to her line of sight like a rock rifle.
Kali would have liked to watch the guard squirm, but she was exhausted after a day in court and decided to let him off the hook.
“Granny, leave the man be. Our time is done.” She leaned closer to the glass. She hadn’t expected to feel any particular emotion towards the woman who had raised her. They had been apart for so many years now, and, before that, Grizmare Titian had seemed less of a mother substitute than a miniature dictator. Only now Grizmare struggled to her feet and, hooking her cane over an elbow, pressed her trembling old hands against the glass-sheet.
“You were my favourite thing,” Grizmare said, her unexpected sweetness threatening to make Kali’s legs buckle out from under her.
The old woman turned and, counting out each step with her cane, went out the door. The nun followed like a shadow. But then the young woman stopped at the last moment and, turning to Kali, pressed a hand to her chest, thumb and forefinger joined. Sign of Mama Sunstar.
“Thank you,” mouthed the nun.
And then they were gone. The guard stepped out and there was the sound of a key jangling in the lock again, and then silence.
Kali slouched back onto the bed. She mustn’t feel, she told herself.
I mustn’t feel…
She couldn’t keep the pain at arms’ length any longer. Smashing the plate of leftover stew aside, she sent its contents slamming into the wall of glass-sheet. The thin mattress and blanket – she tore at those too, slammed her fists into walls and kicked at the bed, which was bolted to the floor.
She collapsed then on the cold hard floor of the cell, sobbing and clutching her chest for breath. Tears fell, like long forgotten rain. She needed the whole fucking sacrifice to be worth something! All this emptying out of everything she had known and stood for. All this loss of the love she never needed until now. There had to be a purpose to it all! She had to have a purpose.
Two days later, Kali was brought before her father and the other twelve judges and sentenced to end her days in the Vary labour camp, Abanddon. As the words were spoken, Kali half-expected to hear a commotion from the
public gallery and to hear her grandmother hollering for her release. In the end, though, the court room remained silent and Kali stayed facing forward with her back to the past.
About the Author
Kim Lakin-Smith is a UK writer living in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Her science fiction, dark fantasy and horror short stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Interzone, Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, Celebration: 50 Years of the BSFA, Solaris Rising, Hauntings, the forthcoming Once Upon A Parsec anthology, and others. Her novel, Cyber Circus, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society Best Novel award and the British Science Fiction Association Best Novel award and she is a previous British Science Fiction Association Best Short Story nominee. Kim’s non-fiction centres on issues of gender, sexuality and otherness.
Author’s Thanks
To Ian Whates – editor, publisher, and dear friend – for bearing with me through all of the incarnations of Rise. To Donna Scott, for helping me shape the story I wanted to tell. To Farah Mendlesohn, for her wise words. To Ren Warom, for keeping me going when I just wasn’t sure. To Daniele Serra for his fabulous cover image. And to Del, my harshest critic and greatest fan, for boundless love and support.
Table of Contents
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part Two
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
About the Author
Author’s Thanks
Rise Page 23
