But first there would be a reckoning.
The smell of smoke and gunpowder filled Quentin’s nostrils. Bodies littered the floor. But his attention was fixed on the door at the end of the hall, where Roland had fled. The deck felt thin between his fingers as he drew the next card. But he was close to Roland. That had to be worth the loss of the cards.
He flexed the card between his fingers, then walked up to the door and kicked it open. He felt a thrill as the impact ran up his shin and thigh. He paused for a moment.
Nothing.
Then he caught a glimpse of a large form through the door. The card burned away in his hand and six glittering blades flew through the air. He felt the smile curl his lips as he moved forward.
But the man, tall and corpulent, still stood. And it was his turn to smile, playing cards fanned out in his hands.
Quentin reached for another card, for one that was higher—in duels the high card won. He pulled out the Queen of Hearts. A potent card, but then he remembered his mother, and hesitated.
A card flashed in the fat man’s hand. Invisible fists pushed at Quentin until his back slammed against the wall of the room. And he couldn’t move. He couldn’t reach his cards.
The fat man moved forward. Behind him, Roland sat in a chair, one leg crossed over the other.
“You have your own cards,” Quentin said.
The other card sharp smiled. “You think you’re the only one?”
Quentin gritted his teeth.
“Course my deck is a bit thinner than it used to be,” the fat man said. “That’s the rub, ain’t it? The more you use it, the shorter it gets. It’s a good thing cocks ain’t like that.” He smiled again and Quentin longed to punch the man’s yellowed teeth in. Quentin flexed at his invisible bonds but they didn’t give.
The fat man withdrew a partially smoked cigar from his pocket and lit it with a brass lighter, puffing on the end until it glowed red. “He’s all yours, Ketterly.”
Roland stepped forward until he was just a few paces before Quentin. He had aged some, was a little thinner, but he still stood rod straight.
“So you came for me,” Roland said. “I have to admit I didn’t think you had it in you. I figured you to be as toothless as your father.”
“Better toothless than fanged”
“Well,” Roland said. “We know which your mother preferred.”
Quentin snarled and tried to move. “She may have swallowed your lies. But I didn’t.”
Roland’s eyes widened. “Such fire. You really are a changed man. But you’ve failed.”
“I made short work of your men,” Quentin said.
“Men are replaceable.” He smiled, showing all of his teeth.
Quentin reflexively tried to curl his hands into fists and was thwarted by the fat man’s play. But this time, the tips of his fingers wavered in the air. Quentin blinked. Was the play weakening? If the fat man had only a limited deck, then maybe the power of his cards was limited. Or maybe he misjudged?
“You bought yourself some time, is all,” Quentin said. “I will kill you.”
“Ha,” Roland said. “You do believe that, don’t you? You are caught. Like a fish, floundering in a bucket. And my earlier generosity is all dried up. Soon, Lacroix here will kill you and nothing will change. Your momma already considers you dead. All I can say is you had your chance. I was happy to let you leave, have a life, find your own happiness. But you couldn’t let go, could you?”
Roland walked away, then turned back. “You know, I said that you took after your father before. And maybe you do, in your blundering. But . . . I was thinking that if your father had the power you had, the . . . the magic, he wouldn’t have spent it on blood, on violence. He would have tried to help people. Used it for one of his saintly pursuits.” He stepped forward and cupped Quentin’s face. Quentin couldn’t flinch away. “No, Quentin. The truth is, in that respect at least, you’re more like me.”
Quentin wanted to scream, to grab Roland and claw out his eyes. But the play held him tight. All except for his fingers, which he could now wiggle. Just a little longer.
Roland smiled serenely. “I think it’s time to say goodbye now, Quentin.” He slapped Quentin’s cheek. “Say hello to my brother for me.” He stepped away and drew a pistol from his belt.
Quentin could now move his whole fingers and part of his hand.
Roland cocked back the hammer.
Quentin’s wrist flexed.
And the Ace up his sleeve flipped into his hand.
Clubs, the suit of fire.
As it flared to life, so did Lacroix, catching fire like a sheaf of kindling. The fat man’s cards, held tight in his hands, fluttered to the floor.
Lacroix screamed and Quentin felt the force holding him drop away. Roland fired, but Quentin was already moving, skirting the burning man, the card in his right sleeve, the Ace of Spades, falling into his hand.
The gun flashed again and burning streaks of pain speared through Quentin as the air filled with thunder. He fell backward and to the floor, the Ace falling from his hand as the world fragmented and blurred.
Roland stepped on the card, then bent over him and pulled the rest of the deck from his vest. He tossed them behind him. “I didn’t think you’d get the drop on Lacroix,” he said. “But it didn’t help you in the end.”
Quentin clutched at his wounds. He had none of the cards in his waistcoat, and had lost the two he’d had up his sleeves.
Roland raised the pistol. “You fool.”
Memory flared, as brightly as one of the cards. Quentin reached for the card clipped into his right boot.
The Black Joker.
The Fool.
He pulled it out.
Roland’s finger jerked back on the trigger.
The card flared in front of him, dazzling his eyes.
The sound of the world cracking reverberated in his ears.
And the moment passed. Quentin was unharmed. The Joker remained in his hand, but the bullet lay in two pieces, cut in two by the card.
Quentin batted the pistol away, and punched Roland in the groin. As his uncle reeled, Quentin reached for the card still lying on the ground.
The Ace of Spades.
The card blazed in his hand.
Quentin sat in the sleeper car, looking at the road ahead. In his left waistcoat pocket was his deck, or what was left of it, twenty-something. After all of the cards he had used at the hotel, he’d been forced to use another, the Seven of Hearts, to heal his gunshot wounds. Then the Queen of Hearts, on his mother. He didn’t know if it would work, if the magic was that strong, but he left her in the doctor’s care. He couldn’t face her after everything he’d done.
His reason for learning how to use the cards was now gone. Half of them had been spent on justice. But he still had the other half left.
All the way from the hotel, Roland’s words had echoed in his head. About his father. And how he would have used the cards. And how right that was.
But first he had a promise to keep. A new card sharp to bring in to the fold. Maybe he would choose the right path.
Quentin had played the Fool and luck had carried him through.
Now was his time to make a new play.
Now he would be the Magician.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Running with the Pack and in the magazines Strange Horizons, Futurismic, Clarkesworld, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Escape Pod, and more. Her work can also be found in my anthologies Federations and The Living Dead 2, and in my online magazine Lightspeed. In addition to writing fiction, Valentine is a columnist for Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine.
For most people, global warming is an incipient but still-academic issue, a bogey man still hiding beneath the bed. For the Inuit, whose land is being revealed inch by inch, summer by ever warmer summer, global warming is as real as an uninvi
ted house guest snoring on the couch. As the great ice sheets melt, new opportunities and remarkable challenges arise for these northern people. This next story dives into the glacial slush—and finds magic treading the waters.
Anna Sitiyoksdottir is an Inuit shaman living in last four acres of protected Inuit territory. Her home of Umiujaq is a paved and peopled land, a land whose magic is bleeding out with every last drop of glacial melt. It’s easier for Anna to do her job as a marine biologist, studying a dying sea, than it is to cope with the broken state of natural magic in such an unhealthy world.
No one knows how humanity will survive in a world of massive climate change. This story asks: How will we find magic in such a changed world? And how will we ever deserve it?
So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen
Genevieve Valentine
Anna woke up knowing the last narwhal had died.
It was a note in the air as she dressed; when she opened her door, the wind sighed it into her face, across her fingers.
(She didn’t bother with gloves any more. Winters weren’t what they used to be.)
It was still dark as she walked over the dirt flats to the observation post, her shadow dotted by the fence that marked the last four acres of protected Inuit territory.
Nauja Marine Observatory had been a three-room school, back when. After the new state schools had swallowed up all the students, the government cleared out the building for Anna (“A gesture of goodwill,” the representative said with a straight face). Now it housed third-hand equipment gifted from the territorial government.
The observatory was on the water’s edge. When Anna went down the embankment in summer, she could look past the electric green shallows to where the shore fell into the sea and left nothing but fathomless black water and slabs of milky ice. The sheet ice was already turning greasy and breaking, rotting through as it melted.
The creeping spring made Anna ill; she didn’t look.
Inside, she pulled up the computer and was registering the date of death when the knock came.
The man at the door was in a parka and gloves and a hat and was still shivering.
“Anna Sitiyoksdottir?”
Her State name.
After a second, she said, “Sure.”
This seemed to cheer him up. He checked his handheld. “Miss Sitiyoksdottir, my name is Stephens. I’m here to invite you to the First International Magical Congress.”
She snorted.
He glanced at his handheld to find his place. “The United Nations has called a task force of magic-users to discuss our rapidly changing magical and environmental climate, and to begin cooperation on future initiatives. As a shaman with natural magic, your input will be invaluable. The conference begins tomorrow and goes for two days.”
“No,” she said.
He smiled and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I will be your escort and aide while you’re a delegate. We can go now, if you’re ready. I’ll wait while you pack.”
“I’m not a shaman,” she said. “And when the last one was alive, spellcasters and the UN didn’t find her input valuable in the least. Pass.”
His smile thinned out. “Miss Sitiyoksdottir, you’re the last Inuit with any shaman status on record, and the government of the Northern States insists you be present. Please reconsider. I have authorization to involve the police if necessary.”
So it was the usual sort of government invitation.
“I need an hour,” she said finally. “Narwhals became extinct last night. I have to find the body on radar and send a report in to the Wildlife Council.”
He blinked. “How do you know they’re extinct if you didn’t see anything?”
She looked at him and didn’t answer. After a moment, he had the good manners to blush.
The narwhal had thrown itself onto the shore to die. Anna saw that the sand around it was undisturbed—it hadn’t fought to get back to the water, hadn’t so much as tossed its head to call out.
“Are you going to move it?” Stephens was breathing heavily from the scramble over the rocks. When he pulled off his cap to fan his face, she saw that his hair was thinning.
Narwhals, like winters, weren’t what they used to be, but the carcass still weighed six hundred kilograms.
“No,” she said, then added, “It’s right that the birds have it.”
“Oh,” he said slowly, as if he was in the presence of great and terrible magic.
She wished the sea would swallow him.
The whale’s skin was pale grey and utterly smooth, like a pup, even though it was adult. Anna knew it meant something, but she couldn’t sense what. She stepped forward and touched it with a flat hand, waiting. Listening. She rested her forehead on the cool, clammy hide.
Talk to me. Talk to me. What should I do?
“Miss Sitiyoksdottir, if you’re not planning to move the animal, we should get you to the airport.”
It was an answer of sorts.
So Anna went. It wasn’t like narwhals would be less extinct in two days.
Her mother, Sitiyok, had moved to Umiujaq as soon as the rest of the province began to fill up with refugees from the Lower States.
Everyone thought Sitiyok was a worrier and a coward to go. She was the shaman; how could she leave them? The land had been given to them; the land was theirs. Nothing would happen. Just because the Southern States were warming up didn’t mean anything. Let some people move north. Who wanted to live in the South anyway, if they could help it?
Sitiyok had smiled at them all, and had moved as far north as she could.
It was not a comfort to know, years later, that she had been right. Her parents’ cities were concreted over to make room for newcomers from the south.
Most Inuit tried to live off the new landscape as they had tried to live off the old one. They gave up hunting and waited tables; they gave up tanning hides and minded stores. They became government workers, or hotel managers, or pilots. Around them the air got warmer; winter was carved away from the land a little more each spring, and Southerners filled in the cracks like a rockslide.
In Umiujaq, Sitiyok took dogs out onto the ice to hunt for seal. She sold the skins she could spare; eventually she sold the dogs. When the sea warmed up and the seals didn’t return, the others in Umiujaq moved inland to find work, one family at a time.
“You can’t stay,” they said. “Come with us.”
Sitiyok smiled, and stayed where she was.
She and a few others remained in the ghost town, slowly starving out on their homeland. Sitiyok learned how to hunt rabbit; how to snare fish; how to go hungry.
One winter, she had a child, and named her Annakpok—the one who is free.
The Congresse Internationale du Magique was held in the Amphitheatre at Aventicum, in Switzerland; it avoided any question about the host country unduly influencing the proceedings.
As they left the hotel and the morning hit her, Anna frowned against the baking sun. “And we’re meeting in the amphitheatre because?”
“For the magic,” Stephens said, waving one hand vaguely before he caught himself. “No disrespect. It’s just—my faith is in science. I studied biology.”
She said, “So did I.”
He coughed. “Here’s our car.”
The Amphitheatre was ringed with police. Under a sign that read PLEASE KEEP ALL AMULETS VISIBLE, two security guards were peering at talismans, necklaces, and tattoos. Inside the Amphitheatre, food stands and souvenir booths had been set up, and the vendors were shouting over one another in their attempts to reach the milling crowd.
The tiers above the gladiatorial floor were marked off by country. She saw signs for Kenya, Germany, the Malaysian Republic, Russia. (She wondered if the Nenets still had real winter.)
“How long did it take to find enough natural magicians to fill the quota? Are there decoys? You can tell me.”
Stephens said, “Please keep your voice down.”
Her name was at the Canadian Un
ited Republic table, beside a man whose nameplate read James Standing Tall. He was older—as old as her mother would have been—and when he saw her approaching he blinked.
“I didn’t know there were still shamans in the Northern States,” he said by way of greeting.
“There aren’t,” she said as she sat. “They’ll take anyone these days.”
The sorcerer Adam Maleficio, Greater Britain delegate, was the last of them to arrive—under a suddenly-dark sky, in a single crack of lightning and a plume of smoke.
Several of the spellcasters stood and pointed their wands, canes, and open palms at the source of the disruption.
“Hold!” one shouted, and another cried, “Pax!”
Adam Maleficio held up his hands. “Friends, hold back your spells! I come among you as a brother, to speak with you of future friendship.” Absently, he brushed off his cape and his lapels. “Absit iniuria verbis, no?”
A handful of sorcerers laughed. He laughed as well, his eyes glinting red, his teeth glinting white.
From behind Anna’s chair, Stephens leaned forward and translated, “May our words not injure.”
Anna said, “We’ll see about that.”
The Congress Director called for comments before the floor opened for debate.
Maleficio stood up with great ceremony and said, “I have been elected to deliver a statement on behalf of all users of magic.”
James Standing Tall looked at Anna. “Too late to opt out?”
“Eight hundred years too late,” she said.
Maleficio delivered an erudite and lengthy Statement of Brotherhood to the assembled. (There was no telling who had elected him to speak, since some spellcasters’ wands stayed pointed at him the whole time he read.)
After the first twenty minutes, Anna and James wrote notes to each other on their programs.
She learned he was Cree, one of the last of his nation. He had remained in the Southern States even after Canada had annexed them. He would come home to a spring of 130 degrees.
I can call the wind with prayer, he wrote. It’s better than leaving.
She didn’t question why he stayed. Anna had no questions to ask about where people dug the trenches for their last stands.
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