The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

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

  “Please, please let us in,” she cried. “Little Fox is hungry!”

  I opened the basket and saw the animal’s muzzle white with slobber, its eyes gone murky with hydrophobia. The eyes stared up at me with vague animal hope. Hope for Lady Death.

  I ordered the eyes to go blank. “Don’t hurt foxy!” Shina screeched.

  The little beast of the Inside World did not struggle with the death I sent it; it lay down gently and almost seemed to smile. I wish I could write the same for the beasts of the World Outside….

  Shina shuddered with outraged horror as the furry body slumped to the bottom of her basket. Perhaps she’d never realized how easily I can kill.

  She started to sob and moan.

  I flung the infected basket into the middle of our back yard and unleashed a sheet of flame at it. The flame cremated the poor creature in a black gout of smoke and a burst of burning meat; in a matter of seconds the foulness was only harmless cinders.

  “Why did you do that, Ashterat?” Shina howled, smearing her tears with her sleeve. “You don’t love me! You don’t love anything or anybody!”

  It occurred to me then that I ought to marry Cinderella off to someone.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 22, 636

  Two long nights, almost without sleep.

  I dreamed of the Beasts, as I had expected. Long ago I trained myself to sleep lightly, to spring to wakefulness at any sign of danger. It seemed a clever idea at the time, but then the Beasts came to my dreams and my nights became a long series of duels. Whenever I dream, many people of the World Inside suffer along with me. Whenever I wake, I can sense those other people wracked by their own nightmare Beasts, gone breathless and trembling with terror—at these echoes from the dreambattles of their Taskre guardian. Everything that struggles to get Inside—the mossy quivering limbs of the Forest, the slimy bubblings of Moor, all the Outside Beasts and creatures, from places both named and nameless—they cannot enter the World Inside without first slithering through the dreams of the children of Mennach. Since Hildur now slept beneath her stones in the Moor in the World Outside, that meant that my dreams alone bore the whole burden for the World Inside.

  My despair and the loneliness drove me to visit my mother. Shilzad had not left her sickroom in ages. She had deteriorated ever since her sad mésalliance with Shina’s father, her second husband. Perhaps she had pitied him, a widower with a small girl—she had lived with him, even married him, and yet never put him the Question. Shilzad had, of course, outlived her weakly human husband for years. Nothing was left of her once-great powers now but the blackened, shriveled webs on her sickroom’s ceiling. She lay hollow-eyed and staring on the white wooden bed her second husband had built for her in Farm House, and that we her daughters had carried here to Bourgeois House, and she lay there for years and she waited for death.

  I understood my mother’s weariness, that spiteful impatience that had forced her into the absurd and ill-judged remarriage and then into this queer parody of old age. If we Taskres did not end in blood, then we ended in driveling foolishness. I could not believe that my mother would manage to die at all easily.

  Shina always opened her stepmother’s windows first and hustled about the sickroom every morning. Despite her tender care, the room still hung thick with dank rags of magical blackness. Shilzad’s gaunt face and thin lips dominated the gloom. She had not eaten for years, starving herself in a vain attempt to win the graces of Lady Death. Her wrists were deeply slashed, but no blood ever came forth. Her shrunken gut was awash with potent poisons that had signally failed to kill her. These dramatic gestures were simply not enough.

  My mother had missed a golden chance to die long ago, and now she was cursed by immortality.

  “So, you want to talk about Hildur now?” she whispered hoarsely. “I know all about you and Hildur, Ashterat. She came to me and she offered me a cup of blood. You and I both know what happens once a Taskre girl has sunk to that.”

  Her voice was as frail as an echo, and still it froze my bones. The counsel of her madness was like some ugly parody of her past maternal wisdom. Why had I come here? To seek consolation? From her? For me? I must be losing my mind.

  “Hildur’s past helping anyone anymore,” I told my mother. “The World Outside will learn this, and then it will concentrate all its efforts against me. It will try to break through me to ravage the World Inside. I’m the last bearer of Mennach’s Curse. My dreams will be more terrible than any I’ve ever seen. I’m the last guardian of the gates now. I’m left alone.”

  The weight of my responsibility overwhelmed me at that moment. I was left alone. Maybe I went to see my mother just so I could tell her that, just so I could write this sentence in my diary: I’m all alone.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: MAY 21, 636

  The royal entourage entered our town at dusk: a herald with the king’s flag, royal men-at-arms in uniform, king’s huntsmen, noble courtiers and their servants…and a prince of Harkur. They were returning home after a long hunting excursion. Only bad luck could have brought them to our city, a place too modest to support a royal visit.

  As they passed through town I crossed my fingers and I spat out a Word, and the prince’s fine white charger slipped and broke its leg.

  The prince took a servant’s horse, but as they tried to leave town, clouds clotted overhead and the heavens broke loose and all the water on Earth poured down. Lightnings chased each other and thunder roared unceasingly. My masterpiece of weather magic. They were drenched at once. They sought the town’s best inn, and found the place as it always was, hopelessly damp, dirty and riddled with bedbugs. They sent servants out in the darkness and rain to search the city’s more prominent houses for help and hospitality, but the rooms they were offered were cramped and poor, with or without the bedbugs, while the best breed of horse our town can manage is a brewery cart-horse. The city’s wealthiest bourgeois simply refused to answer the servants’ hammering at their gates. In the midst of this thunderstorm, the townsfolk were sleeping very soundly. Likely they were sleeping all the better because I myself was still awake.

  Eventually their aimless wandering in the dark and downpour brought them to Bourgeois House, as I had known it would. I had the guest rooms already made up, and my stable even boasted a spare horse. A true beauty of a horse, with shining groomed hide and glossy mane and a noble head. He was black as coal, black as unclean magic, but he had been my pride once.

  It was almost midnight when the royal party arrived, bringing their prince. The prince I needed for Shina.

  * * *

  —

  I welcomed them in the hall beneath the staircase. From the outside, my Bourgeois House looked deceptively modest. For this night, and for the day to follow, its dimensions stretched far into the World Outside. Bourgeois House was immense, cavernous. I always wonder whether guests will notice this discrepancy. So far, they never have. They cross the borders between worlds without a single glimmer of conscious recognition.

  I stood by the window in my goldworked green samite gown, the best dress a bourgeoise like myself could be expected to afford. My hair was laboriously styled and my scarred left hand was safely hidden in my long lace cuffs. Shina, who was the basic reason for this whole masquerade, was not in the room. Stunned with awe and reverence, she was hiding behind a door watching the proceedings through a keyhole—torn between gross curiosity and the terror that a courtier might suddenly discover her lurking there in her mouse-gray linen dress.

  The prince was the last to enter. He strode through a line of respectful courtiers and threw back the rain-soaked hood of his mantle. My knees went weak. In the darkness and rain and in all my spell-castings and Mirror-scryings, I had not taken time to properly study his face. He was no older than Shina. His eyes were like two black opals. Like the night sky at the farthest rim of the World Outside. More beautiful, more
harmonious, more charming, if anything, than the face of his older brother, the Crown Prince. The Prince who was named Lavendul.

  The hunting party had no idea what had happened to Lavendul. They had lost him on their hunting expedition, and they cheerily assumed he had returned to the capital alone. They were hoping to meet him at the royal palace in Arkhold. Meanwhile Lavendul, poisoned dead at my hand, was rotting under the loam at Forest Mansion. The younger prince was named Rassigart. I hated my Mirror for never properly showing me his face.

  “My friends call me Astra,” I said. “Welcome to my house.” I took a jug and poured him wine, with my own hands.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: JUNE 11, 636

  When they left, they took my black horse. They did not take Shina. The arrogant fools took no notice of poor Shina at all.

  In the nights that followed, the Beasts attacked me with unparalleled ferocity. I was worried for Shina’s safety, and I fled to Forest House to fight them in my dreams. I avoided my Mirror—my face looked like stone, like a sandblasted, storm-blasted rock. My cheeks were ashen, my eyes dull as some dying animal’s. I went to sleep with a dagger beside me and every morning I pulled myself from bed, far past the edge of exhaustion, harried almost to madness by the bloodthirsty hounding of the Beasts Outside. It was very difficult without Hildur. I would stagger from Forest House to Bourgeois House in a mud-stained dress with my hair full of twigs and pine needles. My wounds were worsening and I had no power left to heal myself.

  There was only one possible ally left to me—my father, the Sleeper in the Clock. I did not want to pay the price it would take to beg my father’s help. Instead, I propped myself up, drinking special potions. My mouth and tongue turned a leaden blue from sipping vile concoctions of jirmen rind and cockatrice eggs. Sooner or later I would sell my soul for an hour of decent sleep.

  “You really need to rest, dear sister,” Cinderella advised me sweetly, and I snapped and told her the truth: “I may not sleep! I’m not allowed that.”

  Shina’s life was an utter mess now, with her undying stepmother and wretched foster sister, but I had no time or care to spare for her. Worse yet, she had fallen utterly in love with Prince Rassigart. She grew bright-eyed and dreamy and soulful, and neglected the housework to stare idly out the balcony windows, into the street, into my Mirror, her head in the clouds. I surprised her once trying to blacken her eyebrows with a little chip of charcoal from the hearth. I felt so sorry for her that I couldn’t bear to make fun of her.

  If I’d had more power, I’d have conjured her up a ball gown and dressed her to kill. As it was, I gave her money and told her to buy a roll of fine velvet and find herself a decent tailor in the town. She couldn’t do this. Something about this was too much of a challenge for her, too fraught with some strange humiliation.

  I wanted Shina out of the house. Let her marry somebody. If not some prince, then anyone—any half-decent fool, as long as he lived far away. Fine romantic longings were all well and good, but if I fell apart here, she would certainly be ripped to pieces.

  Finally I realized it was no use trying to protect Shina from the truth anymore; girlish virgin or no, she had to be made to understand. I grabbed her wrist, tugged her into my room and flung her into an armchair.

  “Listen, Shina,” I said, voice trembling with anxiety, “you know about the town. And Forest House. And Bourgeois House and Farm House. But you’ve never really seen the World Outside.”

  “Is it far away?”

  “No. It’s very close. It’s getting closer. You could walk out into the World Outside the way you walk out into the street. It could happen by accident. It could happen to you any time. You mustn’t think of it as being far away any more. Think of it in a different way now. Imagine it…imagine you are sitting wide awake in a brightly lit room in Bourgeois House and outside it is night and an absolute flood of wolves and bats is pressing up against our windows. Nothing can happen to us while we keep the doors and windows closed. But if anyone opens a gate…”

  Cinderella nodded, wide-eyed and pale. She was more afraid of me than she was of the truth, but that didn’t seem to matter much. Just as long as she was properly afraid.

  “There’s something we have inside us that pulls in all the Beasts of the Outside World, something they must have, something they lust for. That’s why they squeeze up against our windows and they slink and they wait and they smell out even the tiniest crack or crevice that will get them into the house of light. They want something they don’t have, something they can only get here. You know what I mean, don’t you, Cinderella? I mean the blood.”

  She shrieked and put her hand to her bare throat. I held her other hand, squeezing it hard enough to hurt. “Calm down. I’m not a vampire. If I were, you’d have died long ago.”

  She accepted that, nodding. She sat in the armchair and listened obediently.

  “We are Taskres,” I said. “There are Beasts in the World Outside and human beings in the World Inside, and then there are people like us. People who can travel the worlds. Gatekeepers. Mennach my father was our King, but he fell long ago to the treachery of the monsters Outside, and he left two daughters and no son. After that every Taskre wanted to be the strong king. They tore themselves apart in stupid rivalries and meaningless clan quarrels, and now we are all that is left. We’re not entirely immortal, you know. There are ways to destroy us.”

  “So who keeps the gates now?” Shina murmured.

  “Whoever is left,” I said. I had lied to her about Hildur. I simply told her that Hildur had eloped with a lover. Sometimes I showed her forged letters supposedly sent from Hildur, which of course Shina couldn’t read. Dazed with infatuation with the Prince, Cinderella had swallowed this story whole. It was a nicer story than learning that your older sister had been transformed into a leathery monster longing endlessly for blood. That was not the kind of story that Cinderella could hold inside her little world of goodness, order, and sunshine. A world where morning always came to sweep the shadows back.

  “I hope you’re listening to me, Shina,” I told her. Then I handed her a vial of yellow glass. “Pay attention, because this is important. If you find me some morning with my throat torn open, this is what you’ll have to do. Break this vial and sprinkle this powder over my face. You get Mother onto her feet—do whatever you have to do—and gather up whatever you can carry, any precious things. Take weapons with you. Close the shutters of Bourgeois House, lock the doors tight, all of them. Then run away, the farther the better. Anywhere. A big city would be good. The capital maybe. Anyplace far from the forests and the moors.”

  There was a long silence. “Did you understand me?” I said gently. Cinderella looked up suddenly, as if snapping out of a trance. With unexpected vigor, she said, “Maybe it’s just not like that, Ashterat.” She yanked her hand from my grip and slapped the arms of her chair. “Ashterat, this is a chair. It’s furniture! It’s always been here in our house. This is a town, it’s just a normal little town with real people in it. These terrible beasts you’re talking about, how are they supposed to get in here with us? Are they coming down our chimney? Are they jumping on us out of the closets?” She giggled, then grew very tender and serious. “Sister, you need more rest. You look so tired these days. It can’t be healthy.”

  She knew absolutely nothing, but she was right about the sleep. If I don’t sleep properly, I’ll go mad.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: JUNE 13, 636

  I managed to survive for thirteen days.

  Lately, the attacks have been weakening. I’m simply outlasting the Beasts through sheer determination. Last night I managed to sleep soundly for almost a full third of the night, for the first time since Hildur’s fall. It helped me so immensely that I can hardly describe it. It beat back the killing apathy that had turned my life into dumb endurance. Today is almost like a convalescence. Now I can write a bit in my diary.
I have been reading poetry, the old Harkur songs I love. I put a few things in order in the Forest Mansion. I even put on my veil and went shopping in the market with Shina, but their idea of velvet is decidedly inferior.

  Word in the market is that Lavendul is still missing. He never returned from the hunt and they all believe he must be dead. They aren’t wrong. Rassigart will be the new crown prince. They say he is looking for a bride.

  THE DIARY OF ASHTERAT: JUNE 27, 636

  A letter with the king’s seal!

  The absurdity of it made me laugh aloud: a royal invitation to a ball at the capital, of all things. Rumor was right; the prince is formally hunting for a bride. The news had Shina in ecstasy. Now I have to invent some way to get her into the palace. The invitation wasn’t for her. It’s for me. I was a bit uneasy to see Prince Rassigart’s apparent lasting interest in “the Bourgeoise Astra,” a woman not his social equal in a town that is far from wealthy. But it was all caused by the horse, naturally. I used my Mirror to check the last few days at the Palace stables. There was Rassigart, displaying his coal-black steed to some swarthy foreigner in a spangled cloak. The court wizard went over the horse, gesturing counterspells. It would take a far better wizard than some court functionary to break my magic, but the very attempt was proof of Rassigart’s suspicions.

  Did he want to lure me to the capital? Was the Palace a trap for me? The curse of Mennach—I was very curious. It would be a fine deed to match Cinderella with her Prince, but I was suddenly painfully curious about the Palace. Why hadn’t I gone to the Palace before? Obviously the luxury and wealth of court life in Arkhold would be a natural lure for strong, ambitious, power-hungry men. Maybe the man I’d been waiting for endlessly was already some courtier in Arkhold, wasting his life and talents when he could be the very man to take my Question, drink my potion and survive to transform himself.