by Paula Guran
And part of what he said didn’t quite compute—“I can make these what you callin ‘entities’ do like I want by how I see em?”
“Sort of; what they do also influences how they appear to you—”
“Awright. So what these worms turn into after they eat up everyone dreams? Some kinda gigantic moth?”
“Hmmmm. Could be.”
Images of Japanese monster movies flitted in and out of Brit’s head. She let them come and go. What she really needed to figure out was how to keep the worms from stripping all the silver dream leaves from people’s thought vines—that was what she had decided to name the translucent branches curling through the night: thought vines. Which could belong to anybody. They were tangled up but there must be a way to trace them to their roots, to their sources, which could be anyone. Even her parents. Even her.
Wet and hungry and tired—that didn’t matter. She had left home to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that she wasn’t a whack job. That she knew what she was doing. Which meant she had to know it.
She stopped answering Mr. Crofutt’s questions, and after a while he stopped asking them. She walked straight across the puddle to the stairway where her stuff was, not caring anymore how soaked she got. Because of the idea forming in her achy mind.
If the “entities” had to act like worms once she’d made them take that shape, they had to die like them. Die like worms.
She remembered from her sixth-grade science report how to kill tent caterpillars. You could cut down their nests and grind them to a pulp with heavy boots.
Brit didn’t have boots that big. Nobody did.
You could burn them out.
Could the nests only she saw catch fire? And if they did would the flames spread and burn down her parents’ building? Would the fire she set burn her to death?
She rolled up her sleeping bag and stuffed it in the pack. She pulled out her watch. Midnight. A long, long time till morning. Maybe she’d go home. Slog over to the Westin and find a cab. That’d be a laugh. She wouldn’t have accomplished anything except to piss off Mom and Dad.
She wasn’t scared. She climbed the rest of the way up and opened the door.
The roof was flat and covered in gravel. Brit scrunched over to the edge where the tent stuck up, betting it would be empty. Sure enough, the webbed walls were blank. No writhing. All the worms were out devouring dreams.
She took her box knife from her pants pocket and slashed at the nest’s nearest side, but the knife sank in past its hilt and left no trace, while her hand wouldn’t penetrate the webbing at all, not even a fraction of an inch. She remembered one of the rules for magic in the torn-up book of a runaway staying at their house: you should never use the same tools for mundane and spiritual tasks.
Brit cut things open with her box knife all the time. Mundane things. That left the cigar trimmer.
She hadn’t really been going to give it to Dad. She got it out of the pack and the shop’s bag: a pair of scissors with short, round blades. They made a nice, neat hole in the tent’s side.
She pushed her head into the hole before she could think too much about what she was doing. It was awful anyway. She cut and cut and cut, past layers and layers of webs. Like squirming deeper and deeper inside a haunted house. Arms, shoulders, chest, stomach—she wanted to throw up. Here came that salty taste and the extra spit squirting into her mouth.
She wiggled back out again and breathed through her mouth, hard. And heard a siren in the street below. That was the goad she needed. She grabbed up her pack and went back in the tent. Completely.
The siren died away in the distance. So Crofutt hadn’t turned her in after all. When she was sure they really weren’t coming to get her she wiggled back out again. Drizzle had begun to fall while she shuddered and gagged inside; she actually thought about staying inside the nest all night.
But she had no guarantee the worms would stay out eating till sunrise.
Instead she sat cross-legged on the cold, damp gravel. She took out and unrolled the bag and half unzipped it so it lay like a puffy, down mantilla on her head and neck and shoulders, and formed a little shelter on either side of her. She laid out her tools underneath it: the butterfly lighter, the six fat cigars, ends ritually trimmed, ready to burn.
Then she waited for the worms’ return. It wouldn’t do any good to destroy an empty nest.
She tried not to sleep but dozed off despite the cold and discomfort. Obviously that meant she wasn’t one bit scared of the morning. The red dawn. The horrible vibrations shaking the nest as its denizens poured back inside, ignoring—as she’d hoped they would—the slits and slices she’d made in their home.
Drawing on it as deeply as she could, Brit lit the first cigar. When it was going strong she reversed it and put the glowing end inside her mouth, bending to blow a stream of fragrant smoke into the nest’s heart.
At first the worms stirred at the intrusion, blind heads seeking nonexistent fresh air, but by the fourth cigar they settled down where they were. To rest. The fifth. To sleep. The sixth. To loosen the grips of their hooked legs, fall to the tent’s floor, and die.
She tossed the mantilla over the hole she’d used, changing it to a shroud.
Dizzy and nauseated, Brit struggled to her numb feet. Up, up, up: light and air and hope towered height upon height into heaven. The sun rose clear of a band of clouds. Too bright to the south and east to tell how many more nests awaited destruction.
She stumbled to the roof’s other end. Her shadow stretched north across the city. Beyond it lay her parents and her home. Warmth. Blessed dryness. Anger, undoubtedly. But she would apologize. Even go to the psychiatrist a few times if that was what they wanted. She’d tell them that she’d been wrong, that they were right. That she wasn’t scared anymore, because there had never been anything to be scared of.
She would tell them where she’d spent the night. And let them think they understood.
Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and in anthologies including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and both volumes of the Dark Matter series. Shawl’s Belgian Congo historical fantasy/steampunk novel Everfair will be published in August 2016 by Tor Books.
An immortal duke is dead—at least for now, perhaps for good—and the magic power he stole centuries ago is released into the many labyrinthine streets of exotic Copper Downs.
A Water Matter
Jay Lake
The Duke of Copper Downs had stayed dead.
So far.
That thought prompted the Dancing Mistress to glance around her at the deserted street. Something in the corner of her eye or the lantern of her dreams was crying out a message. Just as with any of her kind, it was difficult to take her by surprise. Her sense of the world around her was very strong. Even in sleep, her folk did not become so inert and vulnerable as humans or most animals did. And her people had lived among men for generations, after all. Some instincts never passed out of worth.
His Grace is not going to come clawing up through the stones at my feet, she told herself firmly. Her tail remained stiff and prickly, trailing gracelessly behind her in a parody of alarm.
The city continued to be restive. A pall of smoke hung low in the sky, and the reek of burning buildings dogged every breath. The harbor had virtually emptied, its shipping steering away from the riots and the uncontrolled militias were all that remained of the Ducal Guard after the recent assassination. The streets were an odd alternation of deserted and crowded. Folk seemed unwilling to come out except in packs. If chance emptied a square or a cobbled city block, it stayed empty for hours. The hot, heavy damp did nothing to ease tempers.
At the moment, she strode alone across the purple-and-black flagstones of the Greenmarket area. The smell of rotting vegetables was strong. The little warehouses were all shuttered. Even the ever-present cats had found business elsewhere.
/>
She hurried onward. The message that had drawn her onto the open streets had been quite specific as to time and place. Her sense of purpose was so strong she could feel the blurring tug of the hunt in her mind. A trap, that; the hunt was always a trap for her people, especially when they walked among men.
Wings whirred overhead in a beat far too fast for any bird save the bright tiny hummers that haunted the flowering vines of the temple district. She did not even look up.
The Dancing Mistress found at a little gateway set in the middle of a long stucco wall that bordered close on Dropnail Lane in the Ivory Quarter. It was the boundary of some decaying manse, a perimeter wall marking out a compound that had long been cut up into a maze of tiny gardens and hovels. A village of sorts flourished under the silent oaks, amid which the great house rotted, resplendent and abandoned. She’d been here a few times to see a woman of her people whose soul path was the knowledge of herbs and simples. But always, she’d come through the servants’ gate, a little humped arch next to the main entrance that faced onto Whitetop Street.
This gateway was different. It clearly did not fit the wall in which it was set. Black marble pilasters were embedded in the fading ochre plaster of the estate’s wall. The darkness within tried to pull her onward.
She shook away the sense of compulsion. In firm control of her own intentions, the Dancing Mistress slowly reached to touch the metal grate. Though the air was warm, the black iron was cold enough to sting her fingers down to the claw sheaths.
The way was barred, but it was not locked. The Dancing Mistress pushed on through.
The dark gate opened into a tangle of heavy vines. Ivy and wisteria strangled a stand of trees which had been reduced to pale, denuded corpses. Fungus grew in mottled shelves along the lower reaches of the bare trunks, and glistened in the mat of leaves and rot that floored the little grove. There was a small altar of black stone amid the pallid trunks, where only shadows touched the ground. An irregular block of ice gleamed atop the altar. It shed questing coils of vapor into the spring-warm air.
Her folk had no name for themselves—they were just people, after all. And it was one of her people who had written the note she’d found strung by spider webs against the lintel of her rented room. She had been able to tell by the hand of the writing, the scent on the page, the faint trail of a soul flavored with meadow flowers.
No one she knew, though, not by hand nor scent nor soul. While the Dancing Mistress could not readily count the full number of her folk in Copper Downs, it was still a matter of dozens amid the teeming humans in their hundreds and thousands.
This altar freezing amid the bones of trees was nothing of her people’s.
A man emerged from the shadows without moving, as if the light had found him between one moment and the next. He was human—squat, unhandsome, with greasy, pale hair that twisted in hanks down his shoulder. His face had been tattooed with fingerprints, as though some god or spirit had reached out and grasped him too hard with a grip of fire. His broad body was wrapped in leather and black silk as greasy as his hair. Dozens of small blades slipped into gaps in his leather, each crusted in old blood.
A shaman, then, who sought the secrets of the world in the frantic pounding hearts of prey small and large. Only the space around his eyes was clean, pale skin framing a watery gaze that pierced her like a diamond knife.
“You walk as water on rock.” He spoke the tongue of her people with only the smallest hint of an accent. That was strange in its own right. Far stranger, that she, come of a people who had once hunted dreams on moonless nights, could have walked within two spans of him without noticing.
Both those things worried her deeply.
“I walk like a woman in the city,” she said in the tongue of the Stone Coast people. The Dancing Mistress knew as a matter of quiet pride that she had no accent herself.
“In truth,” he answered, matching her speech. His Petraean held the same faint hint of somewhere else. He was no more a native here than she.
“Your power is not meant to overmatch such as me,” she told him quietly. At the same time, she wondered if that were true. Very, very few humans knew the tongue of the people.
He laughed at that, then broke his gaze. “I would offer you wine and bread, but I know your customs in that regard. Still, your coming to meet me is a thing well done.”
She ignored the courtesy. “That note did not come from your hand.”
“No.” His voice was level. “Yet I sent it.”
The Dancing Mistress shivered. He implied power over someone from the high meadows of her home. “Your note merely said to meet, concerning a water matter.” That was one of the greatest obligations one of her people could lay upon another.
“The Duke remains dead,” he said.
She shivered at the echo of her earlier thought. “The power of his passing has left a blazing trail for those who can see it.”
“You aver that he will not return.”
The man shrugged away the implicit challenge. She had not asked his name, for her people did not give theirs, but that did nothing to keep her from wondering who he was. “Soon it will not matter if he tries to return or not,” he said. “His power leaches away, to be grasped or lost in the present moment. Much could be done now. Good, ill, or indifferent, this is the time for boldness.”
She leaned close, allowing her claws to flex. He would know what that signified. “And where do I fit into your plans, man?”
“You have the glow of him upon you,” he told her. “His passing marked you. I would know from you who claimed him, who broke him open. That one—mage, warrior or witch—holds the first and greatest claim on his power.”
Green!
The girl-assassin was fled now across the water, insofar as the Dancing Mistress knew. She was suddenly grateful for that small mercy. “It does not matter who brought low the Duke of Copper Downs,” she whispered. “He is gone. The world moves on. New power will rise in his place, new evil will follow.”
Another laugh, a slow rumble from his black-clad belly. “Power will always rise. The right hand grasping it in the right moment can avoid much strife for so many. I thought to make some things easier and more swift with your aid—for the sake of everyone’s trouble.”
“You presume too much,” she told him.
“Me?” His grin was frightening. “You look at my skin and think to judge my heart. Humans do not have soul paths as your people do. You will not scent the rot you so clearly suspect within me.”
The Dancing Mistress steeled herself. There was no way she could stand alone against this one, even if she had trained in the arts of power. “Good or ill, I will say no more upon it.”
“Hmm.” He tugged at his chin. “I see you have a loyalty to defend.” “It is not just loyalty.” Her voice was stiff despite her self-control, betraying her fear of him. “Even if I held such power within my grasp, I would have no reason to pass it to you.” “By your lack of action, you have already handed the power to whomever can pluck it forth. Be glad it was only me come calling.” He added in her tongue, “I know the scent of a water matter. I will not argue from the tooth.”
“Nor will I bargain from the claw.” She turned and stalked toward the cold gate, shivering in her anger.
“ ’Ware, woman,” he called after her, then laughed again. “We are not friends, but we need not be enemies. I would still rather have your aid in this matter, and not your opposition. Together we can spare much suffering and trouble.”
She slipped between the black stone gateposts and into the street beyond, refusing for the sake of the sick fear that coiled in the bottom of her gut to hurry on her way.
There was no one out in the late afternoon, normally a time when the squares and boulevards would have been thronged, even in the quieter, richer quarters.
She walked with purpose, thinking furiously even as she watched for trouble. That shaman must have come from some place both rare and distant. There were tribes and
villages of humans in every corner of the world of which she’d heard. Men lived in the frigid shadows high up in the Blue Mountains where the very air might freeze on the coldest nights, and amid the fire-warm plains of Selistan beyond the sea, and in the boundless forests of the uttermost east. Not to mention everywhere in between.
He was from somewhere in between, to be sure—the Leabourne Hills, perhaps, or one of the other places her people lived when they had not yet done as she had, drifting away to dwell among the cities of men. There was no other way for him to speak their tongue, to know of water matters, to command whatever binding or influence or debt had brought her the note with which he’d summoned her.
The Dancing Mistress had no illusions of her own importance, but it had been her specifically that he’d wanted. It seemed likely the man had counted her as the Duke’s assassin.
That was troublesome. If one person made that deduction, however flawed it was, others could do the same. A fear for another time, she told herself. Had he learned her people’s magics the same way the late Duke of Copper Downs had? By theft?
A sickening idea occurred to her. Perhaps this greasy man had been an agent of the Duke.
As if summoned by the thought, a group of Ducal guards spilled out of an alley running between the walled gardens of wealth.
She happened to be walking close along the deserted curb just across from them. They stopped, staring at her. The Dancing Mistress didn’t break stride. Act like you are in charge. Do not fear them. Still, she risked a glance.
The leader, or at least the one with the biggest sword, had a fine tapestry wrapped across his shoulders as a cloak. Looters. Though they wore Ducal uniforms, their badges were torn off.
“Hey, kitty,” one of them called, smacking his lips.
Corner, she thought. There’s a corner up ahead. Many of these houses are guarded. They wouldn’t risk open violence here.
Her common sense answered: Why not? They had certainly risked open looting.
Colors were beginning to flow in the corner of her eye. The hunt tugged at her. That ritual was anchored deep in the shared soul of her people, a violent power long rejected in favor of a quiet, peaceful life. The Dancing Mistress shook off the tremor in her claws as she turned a walled corner onto Alicorn Straight, passing under the blank-eyed gaze of a funerary statue.
