by RABE, JEAN
Her image smiled, but it was a cold look, full of menace instead of mirth.
“Thou, O Queen,” the mirror replied, “art fairest of all.”
The broken, hooded thing on the floor nodded, took a deep breath, and let it out.
“Mirror, mirror, on my wall,” it asked again, “who in this land is fairest of all?”
Isvíít’s image grinned even broader. It was a wolf’s smile, or an adder’s.
“Thou, O Queen,” the mirror replied, “art fairest of all.”
Heimskur understood, then. He felt the magic in the room, coming from the mirror in waves. He felt its evil. He smelled the rose reek, which he had thought came from Isvíít. Instead, it billowed from the mirror, which wasn’t silver at all. Silver smelled clean, like a spring-flooded stream. Whatever metal it was made of, it was fell and corrupt. He glared at it while Isvíít asked her question a third time, and her own likeness answered again.
“Mirror, mirror, on my wall . . .”
“Thou, O Queen . . .”
“Stygg,” Heimskur said as his clan-brother returned from the door. “Hold her. Don’t let go.”
The big dverg did as Heimskur bade, without question. He moved behind Isvíít, tensed, then seized her arms, holding her fast. She struggled against him like an animal, then threw back her head and screamed, a deranged sound that rose and rose, from a low moan into a shrill keen. Her hood fell away, and Heimskur caught his breath as he beheld her face. She was old and ruined, her black hair only frayed scraps of gray on her bald scalp, her wrinkled skin so pale that every dark vein showed through. Sores crusted her red lips, and madness filled her eyes.
He stared at the yowling thing Isvíít had become, and for a moment he could do nothing. He’d thought he would hate her, but now he felt only pity. Then he heard shouting from beyond the barricaded door and fists pounding on it from outside. It stayed blocked, but he knew he didn’t have long.
He started toward the mirror, and Isvíít screamed louder, shouting words in a tongue Heimskur had never heard. There was a dull sound, a whump, and firelight filled the room, and the smell of roasting flesh. He glanced back and saw Stygg burning, the big dverg still not making a sound as flames burst from his skin. But Stygg kept hold of Isvíít, whom the fire did not touch, even as it consumed him. He held on with all his dying strength.
Grieving, Heimskur turned back to the mirror. He heard the fires devouring Stygg, heard Isvíít screeching, heard hatchets chopping at the door to her chamber. Hate filling his heart, he raised his axe and flung it with all his strength. It flew true, and struck the mirror in its midst.
The foul metal dented, warped, and fell from the wall with a clatter. Isvíít’s cries stopped, and Heimskur heard a thud as Stygg finally let her go, his smoldering body toppling to the floor. All was quiet for a long moment, save the clamor from the door. Heimskur took a step toward the mirror, fear clutching his heart.
As he did, there was a terrible sound, like shattering crystal. An eldritch light poured from the mirror, the sickly green-gray of corpses, and Heimskur fell back, gasping as the brilliance stung his eyes. He didn’t look away, though, and so he saw the ghosts spill out. They were pale wraiths, as insubstantial as fog, but he could see their faces, each of them young and beautiful.
The first two he knew.
One was Isvíít, as she’d been years ago, on the day she was wed.
The next was Vándir of Hitherlond, who had died dancing in her iron shoes.
After that, dozens more shades emerged—all of them women, all surpassing fair. A few looked familiar, as though they might have been queens of nearby realms, but others were strange, clad in foreign raiment, their faces painted as women in kingdoms far to the south and east did. Each lingered only a moment and before dissolving like morning mist. When the last of them was gone, the mirror turned dark. The scent of roses lifted from the room.
Heimskur walked over and kicked the mirror. It crumbled to ash. He nodded and turned away. He didn’t look at the charred thing that had been Stygg, and he also ignored his axe. He had no need for it—he couldn’t fend off all the warriors outside the room. He heard them now, their hatchets splintering the thick door, hacking it to flinders.
He walked to Isvíít, knelt down, and touched her withered face. Her eyes opened, dark and blurred. Despite the gloom, though, she saw him and smiled.
“Heimskur,” she breathed.
“Child,” he answered, his voice thick. She was dying, and he could only watch.
“The mirror,” she said. “It arrived as a gift, for my wedding day. We didn’t know who sent it.”
He listened, not understanding. He had always been slow. Alvííss could have explained it to him—he’d always been able to explain—but Alvííss was gone. They all were.
Isvít kept talking, her voice blurred and dreamy. “It was the queen. Vándir’s last curse on me. The mirror took my soul, as it did hers, and the ones before. All that happened . . . all I did . . . it wasn’t me. . . .”
She shut her eyes. Heimskur took her hand, gripped it tight; her fingers were cold in his grasp, weakening with every breath. The feel of them broke his heart.
He bent low and kissed her forehead. Then he held her, alone in the dark, and waited for the men to finish breaking down the door.
CAPRICIOUS ANIMISTIC TEMPTER
Mickey Zucker Reichert
Mickey Zucker Reichert is a pediatrician, parent to multitudes (at least it seems like that many), bird wrangler, goat roper, dog trainer, cat herder, horse rider, and fish feeder who has learned (the hard way) not to let macaws remove contact lenses. Also the author of twenty-two novels (including the Renshai, Nightfall, Barakhai, and Bifrost series), one illustrated novella, and fifty plus short stories. Mickey’s age is a mathematically guarded secret: the square root of 8649 minus the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with a side length of 33.941126.
Jack crouched in front of his father’s grave and heaved a sigh that gave faint voice to the angst of the past few weeks. He clutched his only possessions in one hand: a hunk of twisted metal and a carved stone wrapped in a greasy, threadbare rag. He ran his free hand through tangled brown locks, grown too long since their last cutting. The knots stopped his questing fingers, the job too difficult. In fact, as he braved the autumn chill in clothing held together by a myriad of patches, everything in the world seemed beyond his scant abilities.
“Papa, I don’t know what to do.” Jack’s voice emerged thin, reedy, and he cleared his throat. “It’s getting cold. I have nowhere to live, no coppers to spend. Without you, I’m lost.” Tears escaped his eyes, leaking in quiet trails along his cheeks. His mother had died in childbirth; his father had struggled to maintain the family, providing the basics for his three boys, the deepest love, but little else. For many years, that had seemed like enough.
The father had left his sons what he could: their mean hovel to the oldest, the few coins he could scrounge for the middle son. For Jack, there had been only one thing remaining, the object swathed in rags now digging its irregular corners into Jack’s palm. A treasure, his father had called it, hidden away for a time of unfathomable need. The man who had given it to Jack’s father had styled himself a wizard, the trinket an item of great power that came also with a warning: “For though it can save a man in his time of utmost desperation, it holds a dangerous aura of evil.”
Or so Jack’s father had told him. But Jack did not believe in wizards or magic, and the item his father had left him seemed like nothing more than a curious knickknack.
Jack’s other possession had proven far more valuable to him. He had found the strange bit of iron fourteen years earlier, when he was only four, snagged between rocks in the drinking creek. The rusty, algae-tangled chunk of metal had probably fallen off an ocean-going vessel. How it had come to lie in the creek he would never know, but its usefulness became instantly clear the day he used it to snare his first fish. Jack had swung it clumsily, repeatedly. After hun
dreds of attempts, he had somehow managed to drive it through a fish’s mouth and out its left gill. He had scooped it from the water, full of pride; and his catch had made up the bulk of the evening meal.
Since that day, Jack had modified the piece, and his technique, until he had become an expert fisher. A flash of silver, a deft movement, and a fish dangled. So long as the water remained unfrozen, his family never went wholly hungry again. And, since his father’s death, Jack had kept himself fed in the same manner. Fish and roots. Fish, with crumbled autumn weeds for seasoning. Fish, fish, fish.
Soon, however, the stream would freeze, and so would Jack. “I need to travel, Papa. Far away, if I must. Where the streams don’t freeze and all the jobs aren’t already taken. I don’t mind hard work; you know that, Papa. But the job has to exist for me to take it.” Through a blurry mist of tears, he stared at his father’s headslab, a crude hunk of deadfall with words scrawled across it in berry juice. Only the oldest son could read, so Jack had had to take his brother’s word that it said, “Beloved Father.”
“Papa, I’m sorry. I think I’m going to have to sell this thing you gave me.” Guilt assailed Jack. Whether the work of a wizard or a liar did not matter. To Jack, the piece was precious because his father had gifted it to him. It was the only thing Jack had to remind him of the man who had served as mother and father to his sons, the loving generous patriarch who had worked so hard in so many ways to keep his brood alive and comfortable in abject poverty.
Jack unbundled the rags to take his first really close look at the thing. Carved from white stone, it appeared exquisitely detailed, far beyond anything his family could have achieved with their crude blades and lack of artistic talent. It depicted an animal of some sort, which he could not identify. It had a face most similar to a coney or a weasel, but the ears rose from the head in prominent triangles too small for the former and too large for the latter. It stood on its hind legs, like a human, though it seemed better suited to a four-legged stance. Its arms ended in paws, its legs swathed in what appeared to be soft, leather boots. It also wore a fancy tunic and hooded cape, with the hood throw back from its head. The tail was long and thinner than a squirrel’s, or a chipmunk’s.
The crafter of the statue had painted it with colors so lifelike and vibrant that Jack wondered where he could have found them. The cape was brilliant red, with gold and maroon highlights that perfectly matched the feathered straps of the boot laces. Jack could best describe the creature as striped, though it did not have the cleanly distinct markings of a badger or chipmunk. Instead, its blacks and whites blended into patchy silvers and grays, and only the white paws and nose and the black tail tip appeared well-defined and singularly colored. Its canted eyes were yellow, with slitted pupils.
As Jack stared, the statue jerked in his hand.
Startled, Jack dropped it in the dirt over his father’s grave.
Stupid, clumsy oaf. Jack berated himself and his suddenly vivid imagination. The well-crafted stonework had looked exquisitely real. He reached for it.
At that moment, the thing twitched again. It tossed and jumped, stretching and blurring, growing in the space of an eyeblink. At last, it stood directly in front of Jack, only two heads shorter than an average-sized man.
Jack leaped to his feet, staring without blinking, unable to tear his gaze from the creature. It was alive, breathing, its strange eyes inspecting him with the same intensity as he did it. The tail twitched chaotically.
Before Jack could find his tongue, or even remember he had one, the animal executed a bow suitable for royalty. “Greetings, Master Jack.”
The standard reply slid from Jack’s mouth without the need for thought, “Greetings.” His brain and limbs refused to operate. Only his eyes continued to function, drinking in the vision in front of him until he memorized every detail.
“You can call me Puss,” the beast continued.
“Puss,” Jack managed to repeat. His eyes burned, and he realized he had stopped crying and forgotten to blink for quite some time. He forced himself to flutter his eyelids until the pain subsided. “Hallo, Puss.”
Puss bowed again. “With respect, Master Jack, you already greeted me.”
Jack licked his lips and loosened his grip on the fish catcher. Only then, he realized he had been clutching it tightly enough to leave deep impressions in his hand. “Forgive my rudeness, but I’m not really certain how to handle a . . . a . . .” He could think of only one logical description, “. . . hallucination.” He rubbed his closed eyes briskly. When he opened them, he expected to find nothing but his father’s grave with a dropped knickknack on top of it.
But Puss remained, regarding Jack curiously. “I surprised you.”
“Entirely,” Jack admitted.
“Well,” Puss said philosophically. “It’s to be expected, I suppose. There’s so very little magic in this world.”
Another shock. Jack decided he was safer sitting down and lowered his bottom carefully to the dirt. “You mean there are . . . other worlds?”
Puss laughed. “Other dimensions, at least. I’m not a traveler by nature, so I can’t really speak to other worlds. I just know that where I come from, magic is quite common.”
Jack did not know what to say. He dug a toe into the soil, hoping this normal, idle action might awaken him from dream. Only the expected resulted: His toe got dirty, and brown dust sifted to either side, leaving a small depression. “You’re real, aren’t you?”
“I’m real.” A grin spread across Puss’ whiskered face. “I’m not an illusion or a dream. Your mind is working just fine. You can punch yourself silly, but I won’t disappear.” He crouched to Jack’s level. “Do you want me to punch you?”
“No. Thank you.” Jack finally asked the question that had plagued him since his first glimpse of his father’s legacy. “What exactly are you?”
“Where I come from, I’m called a cat.”
That answered nothing. Jack studied the creature again. “A cat?”
“Yes.”
“Named Puss.”
“Yes.”
“And what, exactly, does a cat do?”
Again, Puss smiled, a toothy grin that sent a chill through Jack. It reminded him of his father’s warning.
“I can grant your most fantastic wish.”
“A wish.” Jack could not help feeling a spark of hope, even as doubt and worry rose to crush it. He had heard enough stories of men granted their hearts’ desires, only to despise the results when pixies and fairies used grossly literal interpretations to turn desires into torments. “Let me guess, I ask for eternal life. I live forever but as a crippled, shriveled old prune begging for death.”
“No, Master Jack. I have no intention of twisting your words against you.” Puss stood up straight, tail still lashing. “In fact, I already know what you want. A happy life with no further worries about money, meals, clothing, or shelter.”
Jack could not deny he wanted those things, but he still searched for the catch. It holds a dangerous aura of evil. He considered other stories his father and brothers had told him. “What’s the price for this gift, Puss? My eternal soul?”
The cat’s tail quickened its thrashing. “Yes.”
Jack had expected the opposite answer or, at least, for the cat to dodge his question. “Yes?”
“Yes. The price is your soul, Master Jack.”
Jack nodded, finally trusting his legs to hold him. He had known nothing this wonderful could ever happen to him without an impossible catch. “Then, no. I know how these things work. The moment you grant my wish, I get one instant of joy, die, and you get to torture me for all eternity.”
“No, Master Jack. I will do everything in my power to see that you live out a full, happy, and natural lifespan. In fact, I intend to share it with you, if you’ll allow me.”
Jack blinked. The cat seemed utterly sincere, nothing but innocence in those strange, amber eyes.
“Or, if you wish, I can leave you and find ano
ther master to assist. You’ll die of exposure on your father’s grave and take your chances as to the dispensation of your soul.” The cat whirled gracefully, pulling up his hood as he did so and taking a step toward the woodlands.
“Wait,” Jack heard himself saying. “Give me some time to think about this.”
Puss stopped in midstride, then turned slowly.
“A full, long, happy life, right?”
The cat nodded. “To the best of my abilities. If you choose to take up jumping off roofs and bridges to prove your invulnerability, I may not have the where-withal to save you from your own stupidity.”
Jack could live with that exception. A happy man had no reason to behave in such a risky manner. “With love and marriage and money?”
“Happiness would be near impossible without those, and I guarantee that happiness.”
Jack still worried. The wizard’s warning echoed in his mind: “For though it can save a man in his time of utmost desperation, it holds a dangerous aura of evil.” Jack looked at his father’s headslab. Nothing had changed. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes. Papa, if you know any reason I shouldn’t do this, give me a sign.
Nothing followed, not a stray thought, not a movement, not a sound. Jack opened his eyes and spoke through teeth still tightly clenched. “Puss, you have a deal.”
Princess Darcia noticed the creature in the courtyard from her third-story window. Shoving aside the gauzy film of curtains, she peered down to study him more intently. Though human by the ability to walk on two legs and speak fluently, he looked nothing like anyone she had ever seen. In any other guise, she would have assumed him an animal, covered with fur and with paws instead of hands. Yet what, besides people, wore clothing? Whatever else could carry live pheasants and a string of fish to the castle? Left without answers, she watched the guards in the courtyard trailing him with gazes as curious as her own.
