The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 16, 636; THE MORNING

  Cinderella burst into my room this morning in her cleaning apron and gray kitchen smock. She jerked aside the curtains, flung open the casements, her blundering, too-busy fingers snapping the subtle threads of my protective spells. I’ve grown used to Cinderella. I let her dash about my room, chasing nonexistent dust, singing raucously, peering into every corner. Cinderella loved to know the exact order of everything I owned. I allowed her this. The dumb satisfaction she took in this was stronger than my meager need for privacy.

  My foster sister’s proper name is Shina, but we have called her “Cinderella” for years. When she was a child, a neighbor-boy once stole her shoes and told her they were hidden in an ashcan. Shina came home barefoot, a weeping urchin caked head-to-foot with soot and cinders, so she has been “Cinderella” ever since. I have watched this incident several times in my Mirror, so many times that I have lost all compassion for Shina. Perhaps it’s the way that, even as a five-year-old, she was so eager to rat on the little boy. With quivering innocent lips, she demanded limpid and crystalline justice for herself and stern and immediate punishment for him, just as if that were the natural order of the universe. As if the World Inside were her private jail and she held the golden key.

  She saw the state of my bureau, and as she cleaned it, silently, she stole a long look at the inky pages of my new diary. My sleepless night of scribbling. I want no one to read my diary—not yet at least—but I ignored her spying. It didn’t matter. Cinderella is illiterate.

  Cinderella stuffed some papers aimlessly into a drawer, then turned to me. “You’re so pale, my sister. Couldn’t you sleep last night?” She has a sweet and solid little voice, like a young nanny singing lullabies. I cannot imagine her as a true Taskre princess: screaming into the midnight storm, trembling with ecstasy, casting spells of ravagement like chill blasts of lightning, slapping the face of Night with her head flung back and her neck bent like a snake’s—not my dear foster sister Cinderella. She and I, we have no blood in common. Despite our differences, I liked her, more or less. Maybe because of our differences.

  “Have you seen Hildur, Cinderella?”

  “She won’t let me in her room. She says she’ll kill me if I won’t stop knocking. She won’t eat the breakfast I made her.” Her eyes filled with hot wounded tears. She was young and childish and mutable, her emotions like weather in spring.

  I laughed and told her to bring me Hildur’s breakfast as well as my own.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 16, 636; THE EVENING

  This afternoon another fool tried to break into the World Outside. I had to rush to Forest Mansion to stop him. When I broke him free of it he was flung violently across the floor in the Mansion’s hall. He tumbled like a rag doll, and was lucky not to be slashed to ribbons by his own drawn sword.

  This fool was a nobleman. The Forest had torn his mantle and his fine lace and left burrs in his hair and beard, but the eyes in his dark face were wild and lively.

  I liked his face, so I tried to tell myself that he was only lost. There are many Crossroads in the Forest and even wizards sometimes miss the subtle hints that they are crossing boundaries between the worlds. If a traveler were weary, if his march had been long, he might cross a border without knowing it. If I found people stuck in Uncertainty I could usually ease them out, back safely to the World Inside; then the little gouts of chaos and strangeness in their brains would seem nothing worse than odd dreams. They’d see no Forest Mansion of course, but perhaps they’d see some crumbling woodsman’s hut, with a picket fence of human bones and a black cat sunning on the porch. A stony pagan altar, all the bloody litter of old sacrifice overgrown by ivy. Will of the wisps dancing. They’d see harmless conceits and fantasies.

  If they actually saw me, then of course I had to ask them the Question. I would let no one leave my presence without posing the Question. But sometimes they refused the Question. And if they left Uncertainty alive, then they would generally forget all about the experience, once they were safe again in their World Inside.

  Those who travel through and past Uncertainty are far less lucky. They discover the real Forest: the snap and jerk of branches, fanged mouths grinning in the leaves, roots that writhe and live, flowers that blink and stare. They suffer a lethal weariness, surrounded by a Forest that shakes with hunger for the necromantic power in their human blood. The deadly Forest of the World Outside. The Forest is vastly older and stronger than any human being. Despite this, it is astonishing how often people will still attempt to fight it.

  Only men of great vitality, intelligence and will could get as far as the Forest Mansion. Of course this made them valuable to me. I would ask them the Question, and men of their sort would always answer it. And in this way, I had killed every one of them.

  My nobleman sprang up lithely, sword in hand, alert. He had made it from the Forest to the Mansion and now we were together in a hall, with green brocade chairs and tables of inlaid pearl. He stood breathing hard for a few moments until the flush left his face and then he sheathed his sword and bowed to me.

  When he rose our eyes met.

  “Is this all illusion?” he said.

  “If you don’t believe it, touch me,” I said.

  I was no longer in my bourgeois dress. When I had entered Forest Mansion the velvet ribbons of the city style had vanished, so my hair hung black and wild. My striped city skirt and samite corset had become a loose green robe, trailing veils the dusky color of leaves in early fall. Olivine bracelets. Gold and emerald necklace. Green is my color from time beyond memory. I have a weakness for green.

  I was too fey for any woman of the World Inside, and I knew only too well how I must appear to this poor man. He was pale and staring and afraid. Also, charmed.

  “Lady, they were wrong to call you terrible and cruel,” he said. “You are beautiful.”

  The flattery of human men means no more to me than some babble of brooks, a rattle of aspen leaves, the rustle of windblown grain in some farmer’s field. But I liked his clever face. It occurred to me that I could spare him. I could lead him away from the Mansion, away from the Forest, away from the World Outside. I could choose not to trouble him with the Question and the Potion and the matter of his death. That idea seemed quite wonderful, but I am the heir of the Quest, and my moment of willfulness passed and the Quest seized my mind and steeled me to my duty.

  “Lend me your hand,” I said.

  “Will I die the moment I touch you?” he said, but he put his palm in mine. I led him through a wing of Forest Mansion. He was truly amazed to walk beside me and still remain alive. I could feel his thoughts, clear but trapped inside his head, just like bees in cast glass. He was a very intelligent man, rational and unexpectedly sharp, but this fateful moment had paralyzed his wits. Once he had scoffed at fairy-tales and superstitions, doubted the very existence of the Forest and the World Outside. Now he was musing listlessly about Lady Death—Lady Death and her green sleeves. He was not far from truth when he thought that Lady Death and I look like sisters.

  I led him into the great chamber with the clock. I had not been so far into the Mansion in a long time, for I dreaded thinking of my cursed father Mennach, sleeping in that clock. The curtains were drawn and the stale dust-heavy air filled our mouths and lungs with bitterness. Every surface was thick with filth. I opened a cabinet of thickly grimed unshining ebony and retrieved a shining goblet and a gleaming carafe with a cut-glass stopper. I put the goblet in his hand.

  The ticking of the clock filled the whole chamber with its murderous rhythm.

  It was a tall clock in an ebony casing with columns of malachite and a pendulum of purest gold. The works and the casing were aswarm with tiny sculpted figures, with wicked eyes of glimmering ruby. These were the golts, my father’s goblins, who had helped him in his conquests and his final battle. I wonde
red if I would see the figures move today.

  The traveler was entranced by the jeweled hands on the sunken mosaic of the clock’s face, the face that is also my father’s face. The pendulum rocked and clicked many times before he came to comprehend. When the truth dawned on him, he faltered and sweat gathered on his high and noble forehead. He looked at me in silent question.

  “My father…has nothing in common with time,” I said slowly. “Enemies imprisoned him in this clock through an act of treachery which is better not to recall.”

  He nodded. He said nothing gauche or stupid, and I found this admirable. I admired his tact, and his narrow lovely face, and his sparkling eyes and that strong lithe body. Before dawn I would call the golts to help me bury that body, in the much-turned earth beside the Forest Mansion. Sorrow and desire warred inside me like burning waves.

  He knew well enough what was happening to him. He was obviously literate, and had read the old stories, even if he had never believed them. That was why he offered me no violence; he surely knew no mortal weapon could harm a woman like me in a place like this. In a moment he would recall the legend of the Question, and then he would make up his mind about it.

  It all struck him just as I had thought it would: first the shock, then the dawning curiosity, and finally, a kindled lust for his share of the power of Mennach and his daughters.

  “Yes, you could do that,” I told him in response to his silent thought. “You might become the great traveler between the worlds, a Lord and Ruler both here and there. One drink from this carafe and you will know if it’s possible. You will taste a strength and power unmatched by anything in the World Inside.”

  He turned his face as if struggling to hide his thoughts, but I could feel ambition torturing him. It was like standing next to a flame.

  “If you drink this and somehow live,” I said, “you will have enough power to command that clock. In that case, the clock will never strike, and the creatures inside it will gladly do your bidding. But if you can’t command them, that clock will strike the midnight and the potion will curdle inside you and kill you. Decide now.” I paused for a tortured moment, then blurted it out: “If you don’t dare to drink, I will let you go home. I can lead you safely outside the Forest.”

  The Question had been put, and I turned aside to give him silence for his answer. Two kinds of men came here from the World Inside. Both kinds were smoldering, restless, and haunted with longing. Some few did manage to leave, and I was never sorry to see that kind go, for I knew they were useless to me. The others, the best men of their world, stayed and tried. They knew that the lost opportunity would haunt them forever, so they tested their luck—and they died.

  Every death left another little stain of darkness on my soul.

  “Fairy of the wood!” said my nobleman. “Let me try a bit of this wine of yours.”

  “It’s a very bitter wine.”

  “Let me drink, woman. Mere taste is beside the point.”

  I had hoped for something else, but expected nothing less. I filled his goblet to the rim. His hand never trembled. I admired the lovely polish of his well-tended nails.

  “Tell me your name…please,” I murmured. I never asked their names.

  He laughed and tugged a little golden medallion from beneath his shirt. “Lady, you may know my name here—when I die!” The fool had no intention of dying.

  He emptied the goblet at a draught.

  The clock ticked on. The eyes of the golts grew red and shiny. Indifferent to my sorrow, they emerged from the clock and slowly and darkly struck the midnight.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 17, 636; THE MORNING

  Cinderella came to my room as I was smearing on my lipstick, and she made a face. A merry laugh, a little superior smile. The natural consequence of her chastity and virtue, prevailing over my louche and decadent vanity and caprice. Yes, she was still a virgin, and I was no virgin at all. She never used cosmetics and I never failed to paint my face. She slept the sleep of the just and righteous from every sunset to every sunrise, and then she found me in the morning powdering the bags beneath my eyes.

  Sometimes I envied my cindery sister Shina—especially after a night like my last one, full of tears.

  “You need to try this,” I told her. “Use a decent mascara for once, pluck your brows, pay some real attention to your hair. The way you look, it’s no wonder you’re still called Cinderella.”

  “I like the way I look,” Shina said quickly. And I saw myself in her mind’s eye: a blank-eyed, weary creature grasping at youth. But she was so wrong. I was ageless. Far beyond young or old. My face was smooth and unlined, the skin of my throat and breast sleek and dewy, hands small and elegant and utterly unspoiled by honest work. Not a single gray hair. All the doing of my father’s potion, gulped down so long ago.

  Not my eyes, though. My eyes had seen too much, changed too many times. Old.

  I gazed again into my Mirror as Cinderella cleaned my room. She hurried to my writing desk. My diary has become a nagging torment to her dumb curiosity. Oh, that curse of Mennach! That same obnoxious and all-too-human curiosity. It has dogged me always. The world of human beings, the Inside World, was made too small for them. Small like a breadbasket. The hands of the old weaver had whipped their world into being from the lithe strands of wicker, but with the passage of time the little world-basket grew dry and rigid and lost all flexibility: those were the fates of human beings, their customs, their constantly repeating errors. And the wicker basket itself knew nothing of other baskets, or of other and darker bread.

  There was nothing I could do to change the World Inside. It had been young once and I had been young once, and even then I had not been able to change it. Now its rules were firmly set, bringing me nothing but duties and subjugation.

  I was silent and let Cinderella do as she pleased. Curiosity…I should write here about the golden medallion of the too-curious nobleman. But I do not want to remember the medallion. Nor do I want to remember that face, because then I will be sorry that I did not kiss it.

  His gold medallion was embossed with three sprigs of lavender. Nothing more. Lavender is a lovely herb, but the symbol means nothing to me.

  EVENING

  My sister Hildur had retreated to the gloominess of Moor. She traveled through the treacherous sumps to a stone hut she had built just over the border of the World Outside, her cheerless and windowless little fort. There she crouched and waited while her skin grew translucent, while her fangs grew sharper and her eyes began to glow. Wings wrenched themselves from the skin of her back and grew thick and supple. She flew at night to haunt the World Inside and gather blood and strength.

  I might have endured all this, except for one thing. My sister Hildur failed to recognize that anything about herself had changed.

  I managed to cross the Moor by a more-or-less visible path and warily approached her stone cottage. I peered through the open leather flap of the door. Hildur squatted sullenly in darkness, leaning against a damp granite wall stained with nitre. Our eyes met and within her mind I saw a bottomless emptiness.

  At the sudden unexpected sight of me, a chasm of hunger split her open like an earthquake. I knew instantly that I should never have come to see Hildur in her lair in the Outside World. It was very dangerous; it was a terrible mistake.

  Her fanged mouth snapped open with a screech of hatred and she sprang on me. We wrestled on the muddy floor, Hildur going for my throat. The transformation had made her much stronger than I had realized; she was crushing me with terrific blows of her bony knees and winged elbows. I could not tear loose. Finally I wrenched my left hand free and jammed it into Hildur’s mouth. Her jaws clamped shut and I heard more than felt the cracking of my own crushed bones.

  Hildur fell limply to the earth, flopping, glutted. It was very rich blood. She was gagging with ecstasy. Vampires were al
most defenseless when they fed. Pain rose up my arm like a fiery wall as I struggled to shriek the syllables of a spell of binding. The pain overwhelmed me for a moment, but when I came to, Hildur was lying there motionless. I pried her jaws apart and freed my trapped and bleeding hand.

  I worked on my bleeding hand for an hour, long enough to knit the flesh and bones, if not my other, sadder wounds. Then I let it be and turned to Hildur.

  She would sleep for centuries.

  I made her a heavy coffin from dark granite—magic, magic for everything. The lid I sealed with the strongest spell I knew. Symbols that a witch could use only two or three times in a lifetime glowed upon Hildur’s tomb. They were the only gleam of light in that dark house.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 18, 636

  Today I healed my wounded hand more thoroughly. Deep scars still show. I had an argument with Cinderella about a fox.

  Shina often brings animals to Bourgeois House. Lost alley cats, mongrel dogs, mice, and injured birds. She used to feed the local pigeons, especially the turtledoves, which then gathered in vile swarms on the eaves of our house, befouling everything and making obscene cooing noises. Nothing gave her greater pleasure than to comb out the starved hide of some mangy cat, filling her smock with shed fur and hopping fleas. Hildur and I never found it easy to explain to her how deeply and sincerely we detested these habits of hers. Sister Shina loved her little animals with a deep compassion. Our kindly Cinderella.

  Earlier today, out to gather mushrooms, she found a weak and sickly fox wandering stunned through the meadow. She brought it home in her basket. Luckily my protective spells recognized the danger and refused all entrance to the animal. I found Shina weeping bitterly, trying to shove her crumbling basket through a window.