…because of a certain thing shukris can do together, when their wills are joined.
There is nothing in this thing of fangs or blood or torn-out throats. Most often it is spoken of as a myth, a legend, a matter of folklore. There cannot be more than three or four people alive who have seen it done.
I am one of them.
I know exactly what happened when Jassi and Rijo Belnarak’s shukris saw their mistress about to be carried off by the wizard Carcharos. I can see, as I see you now, how they drew close together—so close, in fact, that in the lingering morning mist you might have thought them only one great animal stretching up and crouching to spring. You might even have imagined that one beast actually speaking one fierce word—a word to scrape along all your bones, until your flesh itself rebelled, yearning desperately, desperately, to shake free of them. And so it happened …
I know this. I was the shukri who spoke that word.
No, no, you can go on sipping your tea. It’s wretched stuff, I know—I apologize for it. I have never had the knack of tea. No, I am neither mad nor likely to leap at your throat, I promise you. Once the change is made, it is made—there is no way for me ever to turn back into a shukri again. Everything comes at a price, you see.
It was Carcharos’s moment of purest triumph, I suppose, to be at last holding her in surrender, his hands on her waist and the smell of her strange white hair in his nostrils. As he had sworn—and all wizards are bound to honor their pledges, for good or ill—he spoke the three words that freed Rijo Belnarak’s soul to hurry home to his body. A breath later, a blink later, a heartbeat, what perched on his saddlebow had thick white fur, a short straight tail, red eyes, round ears, and a rounded muzzle aglitter with little sharp fangs. Those fangs raked Carcharos’s wrist when he clutched frantically at the creature that had been Jassi Belnarak—then the white shukri was on the ground and racing for the trees. Her companions closed around her, as though to hide her from his sight, but he shut his eyes and saw her all the same: a tiny scampering brand, blazing through both the darkness of the woods and the shadows of his own soul. Then she was gone from him, and he threw back his head and howled, and trees began to fall.
If you should ever travel the Barrens, you will meet any number of folk who will gladly show you—for a couple of coppers, of course—the place, the wood where all this happened. You could easily find it yourself, though; there’s no missing it, even for a stranger. The downed trees have never been replaced by so much as a sprig of new growth; they lie where they crashed to earth, blackened as though fire had swept over them, as is the ground itself. There is no life in that place, no life at all, not for more than a mile around—I once paced it out carefully to the point where one begins at last to see a few rabbits in the thin young brush, and to be grateful for weeds. That whole section of the wood has been gutted, leveled, razed to a void that folk say still echoes with the madness of Carcharos. For he went mad then, never doubt it, or he would never have done what he did when the white shukri slashed his wrist and fled away. Oh, never doubt that he went mad.
The footprints will tell you.
In the end, the most frightening thing is not the forest’s devastation, not the cold shadows where there are no trees to cast them, not the overwhelming sense that you can actually touch the lifelessness. It is the footprints, scored so deeply into that hard, hard ground that not even a flood nor an earthquake will ever wash them away, burn them away. They are as plain as though he had stepped them off yesterday, those tracks left by the wizard Carcharos when he stalked that terrible dance floor long ago. You can see the smudged prints where he wheeled and spun, the furrows where he glided forward or back in one long stride, the triangular marks where he surely rose on the balls of his feet, raising his arms to the sky. And you can clearly follow the movement of the dance, straight as a stormwind, straight toward what would have been the deep core of the wood, before it fell. Follow it, sitting here far away with me—follow now…
Up high on one leg—you see him, do you not?—the other lunging out, scornfully kicking the earth away beneath him like a hangman’s ladder. But even a wizard’s foot must touch ground soon or late, and so does this one, leaving a small four-toed print, with claws. Then comes another, and another after that, and another, all bunched close together at first, as he finds his new equilibrium—then lengthening out into the long, flying bounds of a shukri with its prey in sight. He was gray, a darkish gray, with no trace of his red-blond glory. I cannot say why that should have been.
There were other footprints, too, that day. I made them.
Barely visible, I’m sure they were, and doubtless gone soon, not having been danced into the deep flesh of the earth by a wizard so maddeningly cheated of his wicked heart’s desire. They would likely have been difficult to read, even for a skilled tracker, since it took me far, far longer than it did Carcharos to learn the trick of balancing on two feet, after a lifetime on four. I hobble somewhat still, no disguising that—you have always been most kind about matching your steps to mine, and gracious enough neither to ask questions nor to take my arm. But this is nothing compared…compared to the way I lurched and crawled, tottered and stumbled and crawled again out of that torn, tormented wood—I, who before had only tumbled in air, whose own dance carried me flying between the hands of two humans who were mine, mine, as surely and always as all my flying family were mine. For Jassi and Rijo Belnarak, I crawled. And crawl now, here with you.
No, until it happened I had no idea that I would be the one chosen to make the exchange. We—oh, yes, I still say we, even now—we never know how the choice happens, or on whom it will fall. What we do know is that it is our choice, always, made together. Made out of…love? We have no such word, we shukris, but we know that nothing is won without sacrifice. One shukri more, one human more—a trade, a balance. So it must be, so the magic runs. Our magic.
But if any wizard but Carcharos has ever worked such a shape-shifting upon himself, I know nothing of it. I was looking straight at him when he changed, as my new form closed over me, and I will swear on my deathbed that he never cared for a moment whether the transformation was reversible or not. Not for a moment.
Carcharos was never seen or heard of again—not in the Barrens, anyway, I can vouch for that. Oh, there were rumored sightings, legends—as there still are, to this day—but they have always proved false. In a strange way, I rather miss him, I do. He was an evil man who took pleasure and nourishment from his evil, but he was ours, he was of the Barrens, do you understand? There is an old saying that nothing ever came out of the Northern Barrens but weak cattle and weaker ale. Carcharos was an exception. We should not be proud of him, but there you are.
As for Jassi Belnarak…well, now, that is possibly another story. Rijo lives still, you know, and still trains and performs with his famous shukris, old as he is. He has never remarried; and for all his undoubted sorrow at the disappearance of his wife, for all these years there has always been an…an air about him, the sense of a secret smile, as though he were holding something deep and near that might interest you, if you learned it.
And so, inevitably, the other rumors began to take root and sprout up, and grow. It is said everywhere, by people unborn when this tale took place, that Jassi Belnarak still comes to her husband every month, under the full moon, when she is somehow able—or allowed?—to take her human form for that little time. And it is believed also that the gray shukri that is the wizard Carcharos still hunts the white shukri through the forest, night and day, never capturing her, nor even drawing close enough to catch sight of her, but never losing her scent, never giving up.
Do I believe the stories myself? No, none of them, certainly not, not at all.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, with all my heart, and if you cannot understand how I can hold both the dream and the doubt in that same heart…well, it is very nearly a human heart, after all. But I wish it so, because I was there, and it should be so. I was there, as surely as one day soon I will not
be here—I was there, and I saw them, and I knew them, and what I lost I gave freely, and it should be so. It should be so.
Stone Man
NANCY KRESS
Here’s a walk down the Mean Streets of today’s big cities, which can be made even meaner by battling wizards—unless you can get a little help from your friends…
Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the midseventies and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, OMNI, Sci Fiction, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo-and Nebula-winning story, “Beggars in Spain,” and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, as well as The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brainrose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Probability Moon, Probability Sun, Probability Space, Crossfire, and Nothing Human. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent book is the novel Crucible. In addition to the awards for “Beggars in Spain,” she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.”
JARED Stoffel never even saw the car that hit him. He ollied off the concrete steps of the Randolph Street Rec Center down onto the street and was coming down on his skateboard when wham! his butt was smacked hard enough to rattle his teeth and Jared went down. A second before the pain registered, he threw up his arms to shield his face. The Birdhouse went flying—he saw it in the air, wheels spinning, a moment before his body hit the street. All at once he was smothered under a ton of stones he couldn’t breathe he was going to die and someone was screaming but it was mostly the rocks—God the boulders flying to land on top of him, under him, everywhere…
Everything went black.
“YOU with us yet, child?”
“Rocks.” It came out “bogs.” Jared put his hand to his face. The hand stopped an inch away on his swollen mouth.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Who.”
“What day is it?”
“Breeday.”
“Just rest a while. You took a nasty fall.” The blurry old nurse dressed in some stupid pants with yellow ducks on them stuck a needle in Jared’s arm and went away.
When he came to again, everything was clearer. A TV on a shelf high up near the ceiling droned out some news about an earthquake someplace. An old man in a white coat sat in a chair by Jared’s bed, reading. Jared tried to sit up, and the man rose and eased him back down. “Just stay quiet a little longer.”
“Where am I?”
“Perry Street Medical Center. You got hit by a car while skateboarding, but you have nothing more than two fractured ribs and a lacerated hand. You’re a very lucky young man.”
“Oh, right. Just lousy with luck.” The words came out correctly; his lips weren’t nearly as swollen. The tiny room had no windows. How long had he been in here?
“I’m Dr. Kendall and I need some information. What’s your name, son?”
“I’m not your son.” Jared lay trying to remember this accident. Shawn—he’d been skateboarding with Shawn. Shawn had yelled when Jared got hit. “Shawn?”
“Your name’s Shawn? Shawn What?”
“I’m not Shawn, dumb-ass. He’s my friend, with me. Where’s Shawn?”
The doctor grimaced. “Some friend. He took off running as soon as the ambulance arrived. What were you two doing that he didn’t want to get caught? Never mind, I don’t want to know. But I do need to know your name.”
“Why?”
“To notify your parents, for one thing.”
“Forget it. She won’t come.”
Something moved behind the doctor’s eyes. He glanced up at the TV, still showing pictures of an earthquake, then returned to watching Jared closely. Too closely. The guy was maybe fifty, maybe sixty, with white hair, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a—was he even really a doctor? Jared said, “Hey, stop staring like that, sicko.”
“Ah,” the doctor said sadly. “I see. Damn. But I still need to know your name. For the records we—”
“I don’t got any insurance. So you can just let me out of here now.” Again Jared tried to sit up.
“Lie down, son. We can’t release you yet. Now please tell me your name.”
“Jared.”
“Jared What?”
“None of your business.” If he didn’t say any more, maybe they’d throw him out of here. The doc said he wasn’t hurt bad. He could crash at Shawn’s. If Ma saw him like this, she’d smash the Birdhouse for sure. She—“Hey! Where’s my deck?”
“Your what?”
“My deck! The Bird! My skateboard!”
“Oh. I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“You mean you just left it in the street?” Gone now, for sure. And it had been a huge set of trouble to steal it!
Again that strange expression in Kendall’s eyes. He said quietly, “Jared, I will personally replace your skateboard, buy you a brand-new and very good one, if you will answer some questions for me first.”
“You? Buy me a new deck? For giving you what?”
“I already told you. All you need do is answer some questions.”
“Nobody gives away new decks for free!”
“I will, to you.” Kendall’s eyes, Jared saw, were light brown, full of some emotion Jared didn’t understand. But he wasn’t picking up rip-off vibes from the man. Hope surged through him. A new deck…maybe an Abec four…
He squashed the hope. Hope just got you hurt.
Kendall reached into his pocket and drew out a wad of bills. “How much does a good skateboard cost?”
Jared’s eyes hung on the money. He could get a Hawk deck…good trucks and wheels…“Two hundred dollars.” Maybe the old guy didn’t know what stuff cost.
Kendall counted ten twenties and held them out in his closed hand. “After you answer three questions.”
“Just three? Okay, but better not try anything perv.”
“First, your name and address.”
“Jared Parsell, 62 Randolph.”
Kendall withdrew his hand. “You’re lying.”
How did the old bastard know? “Wait, don’t put the money away…I’m Jared Stoffel, and I live at 489 Center Street.” When he lived anywhere at all. Ma, strung out on crystal most of the time, only noticed when he screwed up, not when he stayed away. She was pretty lame about time.
Kendall said, “When were you born?”
“April 6, 1993.”
Closing his eyes, Kendall moved his lips silently, as if figuring something. Finally, he said, as if it mattered, “Full moon.”
“Whatever.”
“Now the last question: How did all those stones get around you during the hit-and-run?”
“What?”
“When the ambulance arrived, you were lying on, and were covered with, small stones. They appear to have come from a flower bed on the other side of the Recreation Center. How did they get with you?”
A vague memory stirred in Jared’s mind. Rocks—he was being smothered with rocks, and someone—him—said “bogs.” And Shawn yelled something as Jared fell, something Jared couldn’t remember now…Jared had thought the rocks were in his mind—something from, like, the pain of the accident. Not real. But maybe…
Kendall was watching him sadly. Why sad? This old psycho gave Jared the creeps.
“I don’t know anything about any stones.”
“You and Shawn weren’t playing some game involving the stones? Throwing them at cars or something?”
“Jesus, man, I’m thirteen, not eight!”
“I see,” Dr. Kendall said. He handed the two hundred dollars to Jared, who seized it eagerly, even though leaning forward caused pain to stab through his torso. Jared moved his legs toward the end of the bed.
Kendall eased them back. “Not yet, son, I’m afraid.” He looked even sadder than before.
“Get y
our hands off me! I answered your stupid questions!”
“Yes, and the money is yours. But you can’t leave yet. Not until you see one other person.”
“I don’t want to see any more doctors!”
“It’s not a doctor. I’m a doctor. Larson is a…well, you’ll see. Larson!”
The door opened and another man entered. This one was young, big, tough-looking, with long hair and a do-rag. He wore a leather jacket and gold necklace, serious gold. A dealer, maybe a gangbanger, maybe even a leader. Or a narc. He stood at the end of Jared’s bed, big hands resting lightly on the metal railing, and stared unsmiling. “So is he, Doc?”
“Yes.”
“You sure? Never mind, I know you don’t make mistakes. But, God…look at him.”
“Look at your dumb-ass self,” Jared said, but even to him the words sounded lame. Larson scared him, although he wasn’t going to admit that.
“Watch your mouth, kid,” Larson snarled. “I don’t like this any better than you do. But if you are one of us, then you are. The doc doesn’t make mistakes. Damn it to hell anyway!”
“If I’m what? What am I?” Jared said.
“A wizard,” Dr. Kendall said. “You’re a wizard, Jared. As of now.”
LARSON left the explanations to Kendall. With a disgusted look over his shoulder at the hospital bed, Larson stormed out, slamming the door. Jared caught the scandalized look of a passing nurse just before the door shook on its hinges.
Wizards: Magical Tales from the Masters of Modern Fantasy Page 30
