Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  “I conjure you by the Lord who created heaven and earth to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes what is false; I conjure you by the staff with which Moses divided the sea to reveal to me what is true and to conceal from my eyes that which is false; I conjure you by the heavenly host, the hands of God, Akriel, Gabriel, Hatach, Duma, Raphael, Zafniel, Nahabiel, Inias, Kaziel…”

  While I chanted I watched the wine intently. If I had stopped chanting even for one moment, the spell would cease, so I listed every magical name I knew, every name I could imagine, every feat of every great Jewish hero and heroine as the wine bubbled, frothed, churned, and finally smoothed out as still as glass. Then letters began to appear, as though they were being slowly etched into the surface of the wine. Without breaking my chant, I groped for paper and pen and copied the letters exactly. When no more letters appeared and the wine was still again, I finally brought the chant to an end, and the wine became plain wine once more.

  I took a couple of deep shuddering breaths, feeling sick to my stomach. I had never properly been trained for this and I didn’t know the safeguards that I should have had in place, that my bubbe would have had in place if she had been casting this spell. I felt very ill, weaker than I ever had before.

  I called Shayna in and showed her the letters written on the pad.

  “Not the Lord nor all the heavenly host will break a signed contract,” I told her. “You will have to do it yourself.”

  “And how am I to do that, big sister?”

  “You must force the demon to tear up the contract. Then she will have no power to take your little one. The demon does not have to listen to the names of the Lord and his angels, but she must answer to her own.” I tapped the paper. “This is her name. You must bind her with it and force her to make you free of the contract. It is the only way.”

  Shayna took the paper and started to sound out the name. Quickly, I put my hand over her mouth. We didn’t want to attract the creature’s attention before we were ready.

  * * *

  At sunset the next evening, we waited in one room: Shayna, me, Ruthie, and Sol with Yael in his arms.

  And then the lilit strolled into the room. She looked like me, this time. Just like me.

  Shayna started to shake. I took her hand. “Don’t be frightened,” I told her.

  Then Shayna turned to look at me and I saw that she was not frightened. She was angry. I gave her hand a squeeze and hoped that she wouldn’t let anger overwhelm our planning.

  The demon chuckled and spat. Her spittle sizzled and burned through our rug, my wedding present for Shayna and Sol. “Your bubbe is suffering a thousand torments as she reviews the ways in which your troubles are her own doing. You, Deborah, I will deal with later, for we have so much in common, after all.”

  I shook my head—no, we have nothing in common—and heard the demon say, “Now, Shayna maedele, give me Yael. Give me the baby girl.” She cracked her knuckles and grinned my grin, our bubbe’s grin.

  Sol tightened his arms around the baby while Shayna stared at the demon.

  The demon smirked and displayed the contract that had been signed twice, once by my bubbe and once by Shayna. “I fulfilled my end of the contract twice, giving your grandmother powers and doing your sewing. It’s not my fault she was killed before she could use them or that the mob took your brother before I could. I’ll just have to do what I can with this one instead.” She snapped her fingers. Yael disappeared from Sol’s arms and reappeared in the demon’s. Yael began to scream and claw at the demon’s hands with her tiny nails.

  “Abomination!” Shayna screamed, extending an arm and shaking her finger at the creature. “Abomination! Cursed in the sight of Adonai, Tetragammon, and all his host! Abomination! I, Shayna, daughter of Rokhel, conjure you to forfeit the child Yael, daughter of Shayna! I conjure you to release me from our contract, a contract shameful in the eyes of God and man, a contract conceived and gotten by you, the lowest of the low, the slime of worms and shit of pigs! I conjure you to destroy this contract and leave this city, leave this earth and spend eternity in the realm of unspeakable things! I conjure and bind you by your own soul, your own self, your own name—” Shayna pointed her finger at the creature’s heart and yelled, “RUMFEILSTILIZKAHAN!”

  The demon turned gray and began to spin in place. “The devil told you that!” she howled. “The devil told you that!”

  “Not the devil, unclean thing,” Shayna said, triumphant. “My sister.” And she seemed proud to have me by her side.

  The demon spun and howled wordlessly until the very air burst into flames and it and the contract it was holding imploded into burning embers that vanished in midair. Sol leapt to catch Yael before she fell to the ground. The only sign that a stranger had been in the room was the hole in the rug.

  * * *

  We had Yael, ours to keep forever, but not without cost. Finding the name of the demon had been powerful magic, and the exhaustion that followed, the weakness that comes when you do a great feat for which you have never been properly trained, made me sick, sicker than I had been for many, many years. Sicker than I had been since the Old Country.

  I tossed and turned with fever for days and a livid rash spread across my face and limbs. I burned so fiercely that Shayna brought in a doctor who looked me over and pronounced, “Scarlet fever.”

  Scarlet fever! A child’s disease, after all—insult to injury, that was. But then again, conjuring the demon’s name had left me weak as a child. My skin burnt so fiercely that it turned bright white. Shayna held cold compresses against my skin, but within minutes the heat from my body made them feel like they’d been warming in the stove for an hour. My fever climbed every day, burning what little sense I had left. Ruthie stayed home from work for days trying to spoon broth into my mouth so I wouldn’t dry out entirely, or so I am told—for again, I don’t remember much of those days. But with Ruthie home and me too sick to do any business, we were short of money, and Shayna went back to factory work.

  Sol’s mother found it a shame, a married woman in a factory, but Shayna told Ruthie that, actually, she did not mind. “With Sol and his brothers and his parents in the store,” she told me, “all I am is underfoot. In the factory, I’m somebody. I’m good at what I do there. I’m good enough that I think that someday I’ll get to be a sample-maker, maybe even a designer.”

  And she was so happy, said Ruthie, with the work she found—a modern factory, large, airy, three floors, imagine that, she said, and so high up the girls needed elevators to come and go. And so easy it was for her to get the job there, she didn’t have to pay off anybody, she said—it was like magic, like an angel was watching over her.

  Too easy, in retrospect.

  I don’t remember any of that. All I really remember are the dreams—every hour I managed to sleep I was plagued with nightmares, dreams in which my eyes were worms of fire burrowing through my head, or my head and hands became so swollen that I was sure they would burst, or I was falling, falling so far that I would never stop, never come to earth again. The pink rash had become raised crimson blisters. For weeks this lasted, and then … one night, late in March, the fever broke, and I sweated through three blankets. Ruthie washed linens all night, and that morning I woke up hungry. Ruthie fed me some breakfast: a little soup, a little milk, a soft-boiled egg. For two or three days she tended me while I regained my strength, and then she went out to work.

  I was weak, and for most of the day, I sipped tea and tried to rest, but as morning shaded into afternoon the watery sunlight finally pulled me to my feet. Taking slow, tiny steps, I dressed myself and made my way down to Sol’s store, where I found him behind the counter and his mother minding Yael. His mother agreed with me that fresh air would do me all the good in the world, so slowly, painfully, I stepped out into the street.

  The sunlight, weak as it was, was painfully bright to my eyes. It bounced harshly off cold streets, all sharp angles and hostile edges. I pulled my jacket closer
around my body; when Shayna had first stitched it for me, it had hugged me close, displaying my figure, but the weeks of illness had wasted me. A chill wind cut through a near alley and I trembled.

  What struck me most about the street was how quiet it was, unnaturally quiet. There were no children playing skip rope or taunting each other, no peddlers trying to sell their wares, no friends arguing good-naturedly or couples screaming at each other. Just my soft, frightened footsteps and the wind. For a minute I was convinced that the illness had taken my hearing as well as my figure.

  I walked carefully, keeping one hand on the buildings for support. When I finally got to the end of the block, the sounds of street life flooded back and I became dizzy with relief. I caught a bit of life from the remaining sunshine and went where my feet took me. I didn’t know where I was going, only that I wasn’t strong enough to get there as quickly as I needed to.

  But still, behind the street sounds, beneath the bustle, I heard that sinking silence.

  I was three blocks away from the park when I heard the fire engines coming up behind me. They passed me easily and by the time I arrived at the Asch Building I barely had breath enough to push through the crowd.

  The silence was gone. Screaming and roaring filled my ears and poisonous black smoke filled the sky. I didn’t understand what was happening—bundles of clothing trailing flames seemed to be falling from the sky while the few doors of the Asch Building were choked with people clawing and crawling over one another in order to get out. Once they did get out, though, they just joined the yelling throngs across the street, watching the falling bundles hitting the street with solid, damp thuds, one right after another. It wasn’t until I saw one of the bundles trying and failing to push itself to its feet that I realized what they were.

  This was Shayna’s modern factory, I knew it, and I knew it had been no angel that had gotten her the job there.

  I found myself out in the street where firemen were frantic with their own futility. Their rescue ladders went up seven stories—the factory was on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. One woman staggered out of the building and immediately turned and tried to run back in. The firemen had to knock her out; she kept yelling about her daughter.

  I looked up. One girl stood on the window’s ledge. Already her skirt was beginning to smolder and even though she was so far above me, I swear I could see her face, unnaturally calm as she opened her purse and threw the money inside down to the street—and I remembered Shayna saying that today would be payday.

  She took off her hat and sent it sailing in the direction of the park and the wind whipped her hair around her face. I could see flames as well as smoke coming out of the windows now.

  Her dress was on fire.

  She smoothed her hair back and stepped off the ledge as if she were stepping off the curb and crossing the street. She plummeted and her skirts rose up around her, a flower of flame. She landed only six feet from me. A cinder hit my cheek and bounced away before I could move.

  Three women stood on another window ledge together. They linked arms, closed their eyes, and jumped, and their aim was good, but they tore right through the bottom of the safety net, and the firemen holding it were splattered with blood.

  “I didn’t know, I didn’t know they would come down three, four at a time, arms wrapped around each other’s waists,” the fire chief wept when Ruthie interviewed him later.

  I searched the faces of the women pouring out of the building, running to avoid being hit by the falling girls, their friends, but I didn’t find Shayna there. I ran through the street, pulling away from the men who tried to stop me, looking at the fallen, but I could not find my sister among them either.

  I looked up at the flame-filled windows. There was no more jumping now.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered.

  I wept while the building flamed with girls burning, burning here in America.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Veronica Schanoes

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Anna & Elena Balbusso

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  I leave Gabriel in the yard and go into town, taking my bag with the vials of skin and bone, flesh and blood, my regular delivery to Makin. The Peels are looking for body parts.

  I love the grandeur of The Strand. High towers of ornate stone. The road’s packed with wagons and carts. Boats choke the river. The Mersey is the city’s blood and it runs rich. Liverpool lives again.

  I can hear the stevedores’ calls, those kings of distribution and balance, whose job it is to oversee the dockers loading the barges. The boats must be perfectly weighted for their journey up the Manchester Ship Canal. Guards check them to ensure no unlicensed man steals aboard. Farther along, at Albert Dock, there’s a flock of white sails. The Hardman fleet’s arrived, tall ships bringing cotton from America.

  The Liver birds keep lookout. Never-never stone creatures that perch atop the Liver Building where all the families have agents. I keep my eyes fixed on the marble floor so that I don’t have to look at the line of people desperate for an audience. Peels’ man has the ground floor. The Peels’ fortune came from real estate, small forays such as tenements at first, but money begets money. They took a punt when they redeveloped Liverpool’s waterfront, a good investment that made them kings of the new world.

  The other families have managers on other floors, all in close proximity as nothing’s exclusive, business and bloodlines being interbred. The Hardmans are textile merchants, the Rathbones’ wealth was made on soap, of all things, while the Moores are ship builders.

  The outer offices contain rows of clerks at desks, shuffling columns of figures in ledgers. A boy, looking choked in his high-necked shirt, runs between them carrying messages. No one pays me any mind.

  Makin’s secretary keeps me waiting a full minute before he looks up, savouring this petty exercise of power. “He’ll see you now.”

  Makin’s at his desk. Ledgers are piled on shelves, the charts and maps on the walls are stuck with pins marking trade routes and Peel territories.

  “Have a seat.” He’s always civil. “How did you fare today?”

  “A few agreed.”

  I hand him the bag.

  “They’re reluctant?”

  “Afraid.”

  There are already rumours. That the Peels, Hardmans, Rathbones and Moores, these wealthy people we never see, are monstrosities that live to a hundred years by feasting on Scousers’ flesh and wearing our skins like suits when their own get worn out. Their hands drip with diamonds and the blood of the slaving classes. They lick their fingers clean with slavering tongues.

  Makin taps the desk.

  “Should we be paying more?”

  “Then you’ll have a line that stretches twice around the Mersey Wall consisting of drunken, syphilitic beggars.”

  “Do we have to order obligatory sampling of the healthy?”

  “That’s unwise.”

  His fingers stop drumming.

  “Since when are rag and bone men the font of wisdom?”

  I’m not scared of Makin but I need the money so I’m respectful. Besides, I like him.

  “At least wait ’til it’s cooler before you announce something like that or you’ll have a riot.”

  That brings him up short.

  “I’m feeling fractious today.” He rubs the top of his head like a man full of unhappy thoughts. “Don’t be offended.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re a good sort. You work hard and don’t harbour grudges. You speak your mind instead of the infernal yeses I always get. Come and work for me.”

  “Thank you but I hope you won’t hold it against me if I say no.”

  “No, but think on it. The offer stands.” Something else is bubbling up. “You and I aren’t so different. I had to scramble too. I’m a Dingle man. My daughters are spoilt and innocent. My sons no better.” His rueful smile reveals the pain of parenthood. “It’s their mother’s
fault. They’re not fit for the real world, so I must keep on scrambling.”

  I envy his children, wanting for nothing, this brutal life kept at arm’s length. Makin must see something in my face because he puts the distance back between us with, “Have you heard any talk I should know about?”

  He’s still chewing on my unpalatable comment about riots.

  “All I meant was that it’s unseasonably hot and a while since the last high day or holiday. Steam builds up in these conditions.”

  I hear craziness in the ale houses all the time that I’m not going to share with him. Talk of seizing boats and sailing out of Liverpool Bay, north to Blundell Sands and Crosby to breathe rarefied air and storm the families’ palaces. Toppling the merchant princes. A revolution of beheading, raping and redistribution of riches.

  Tough talk. Despairing men with beer dreams of taking on armed guards.

  “They can riot all they like. Justice will fall hard. Liverpool’s peaceful. There’ll be no unions here. We’ll reward anyone who helps keep it that way.”

  I want to say, The Peels aren’t the law, but then I remember that they are.

  * * *

  I cross Upper Parliament Street into Toxteth. My cart’s loaded with a bag of threadbare coloured sheets which I’ll sell for second-grade paper. I’ve a pile of bones that’ll go for glue.

  “Ra bon! Ra bon!” I shout.

  Calls bring the kids who run alongside me. One reaches out to pat Gabriel, my hound, who curls his lip and growls.

  “Not a pet, son. Steer clear.”

  When I stop, the children squat on the curb to watch. They’re still too little for factory work.

  “Tommy, can I have a sweet?”

  “No, not unless you’ve something to trade and it’s Tom, you cheeky blighter. Shouldn’t you be in school?”