by Ian Whates
It was as though the interior were an inverted version of the exterior. A single room, as rotting and broken as the rest of the village. The ceiling and roof were missing, showing a clear, star-filled sky, magical, so very different from the dreary emptiness of the sky outside. But most of the floor was also missing. The old wooden boards had been crudely broken away, leaving a gaping pit filled with silent, heatless fire, sinking who knew how far into the ground. The remaining rim of floor was less than three feet wide around the pit, and didn’t feel too stable beneath Jurin’s feet.
“Hello, Miss.”
The voice startled Jurin, clearer and louder than the faint whisper of patrons.
She hadn’t noticed the man standing on the opposite side of the pit. He was elderly, grey-looking, worn and weary, his eyes hollow, but with amiable enough expression. He wore threadbare clothes – shirt and trousers, and an old woollen waistcoat. Behind him was a closed door.
Once again, Jurin remembered the words of the magician. “To find the monster, you must step into Otherside. To do that, you must first pass the gatekeeper.”
And the gatekeeper said, “I wasn’t expecting anyone else in tonight.” His tone was perfect for a kindly grandfather. “As you can see, we’re a little busy.”
He didn’t seem to know where he was as he gestured to the empty room and what remained of the rotting floorboards around the fiery pit. He did so as though the echo of revelry was accompanied by the presence of tables and customers, and the smells of roasting meat, tobacco smoke and ale.
Jurin fancied she heard a distant sigh of laugher, and then, with an apologetic air, the gatekeeper added, “I’m sorry, Miss, but I haven’t got any rooms left.”
When Jurin said nothing, he ran his fingers through thinning hair to scratch the bald spot on his crown. “Let me have a quick word with the missus, see if we can rustle something up for you,” and he turned to the closed door behind him.
Of this man, the magician had said, “You must think of the gatekeeper as a lost spirit, a wisp, addicted to the memory of the life he once led. He is harmless, Jurin, but if you let him leave, you will be stuck in that room forever... or until madness drives you into its pit of fire.”
As the gatekeeper’s hand closed around the doorknob, Jurin’s arm flashed forwards. The spear flew across the room, over the pit, hitting the old man square in the back, slicing through him. The magic in the spearhead sparked as it thudded into the door. Without so much as one yell of pain, the gatekeeper faded, his spirit swirling to nothing.
The room began to change. The remains of the walls collapsed; the brittle beams crumbled to tinder. Jurin tried to back away, but behind her the entrance had been replaced by a viscous fluid as thick as pitch but fog-grey in colour. It spread, cracking and creaking, replacing the walls and floor. It was slippery beneath Jurin’s feet, and she watched as the substance poured into the gaping, fiery hole, dousing the flames, until the void was filled and Jurin stood in a cavern that looked to be formed from hard, dirty ice.
“Once you have dealt with the gatekeeper,” the magician had explained, “the real fun can begin.”
On the opposite side of the cavern, where the second door had been, a tunnel led into darkness. The magical spear lay on the floor before its mouth. Jurin’s footsteps echoed as she crossed the cavern and retrieved her weapon. She stared into the dark tunnel, and someone spoke.
Jurin...
There was no mistaking old Balia’s voice. Jurin’s leader, her captain, spoke directly into her mind.
Jurin... why?
Her teeth gritted, the way illuminated by magic contained in a crystal teardrop, Jurin stepped into the tunnel.
“In Otherside you will face your shame,” the magician had warned. “In Otherside your nightmares are real.”
Jurin felt pressure in her ears. Her breath, hot and steaming, murmured around the tunnel. By the light of the spearhead she saw movement, people behind the dirty-ice walls. Or were they trapped within the grey substance? Fleeting glimpses of suffering: mouths opened in screams; fingers clawing to be free; fists smashing. Noiseless. Desperate. Stolen ghosts. Jurin ignored them and her fear, willing her feet to keep walking forwards.
“You hid like a coward,” the magician had said. There had been no accusation in her voice, no judgement. Only the truth. “You hid, and when the monster set about your friends, you spied your chance to escape. While they died, you ran and you ran until the village let you go.” The magician had chuckled. “I wonder, Jurin – how soon after your escape did guilt begin to poison your mind?”
Jurin began running, her knuckles white as she gripped the spear and charged down the tunnel. The voice of the magician scurried through her memory.
“I’m rather glad of your cowardice, Jurin. By abandoning your friends, you have grown a desire for atonement at any cost. This is our strongest weapon against the monster.”
Jurin shouted her defiance, her anger, her shame. The end of the tunnel came into view, a disc of sterile light, and she quickened her pace. A wind of dead men’s breath buffeted her, trying to push her back, but her step didn’t falter. She heard voices, cries and bellows of pain and rage; and a smell, sour, toxic, dangerous... the smell of a monster.
The way ahead blurred. A sudden pain seared through her head. A starburst of light blinded her eyes. And Jurin leapt into Otherside.
She was back in the village square. Above, the sky was again coloured with the purple and green hues of bruised skin. Broken buildings formed a wide box around the square, but the impossible, bizarre inn was gone. In its place, the remnants of a well; a well that Jurin remembered. It looked exactly as it had over a year ago: the hiding place that had saved the life of a coward. And standing beside it was Balia.
Jurin’s heart skipped a beat to see her old captain. But Balia was not pleased to see her.
The aging soldier backed away from Jurin, hastily removing her traveling cloak. She drew her sword, and held it threateningly, defensively. Her hand shook.
Confused, Jurin called to Balia with words of camaraderie, but the voice that came out of her mouth was a roar, vicious as thunder. Balia prepared to attack. Jurin raised a hand in a calming gesture, but the hand that rose before her was that of a giant. Nails black, skin the colour of corpses, puckered and thick like the hide of an ox. She no longer held the spear but a huge hammer, its head a block of chipped and cracked stone. The weapon of a monster.
Balia attacked. Jurin rumbled a laugh and forgot who she was.
The monster’s hammer met the sword, stone clashing against metal, and sent it spinning away, along with the hand that held it. Screaming, Balia clutched her bleeding stump and sank to her knees. The monster’s next blow removed her head from her shoulders with a spray of blood and bone. Even as Balia’s body toppled to the mud, her ghost rose from her remains, a thorny tangle of silver wisps. The monster hungered, calling to the spirit. As though drawn to the blood covering the hammer, the spirit raced towards the monster in many streaks of silver, each one absorbed into the weapon’s stone head.
Stepping over Balia’s body, the monster moved on to the weeping wretch that was Taalij. The youngster crouched in the mud, covering his head with his hands. The sound of his whimpering was as irritating to the monster as a volley of arrows stabbing its leathery hide. A jab from the hammer punched Taalij onto his back. A downward strike crushed his ribcage. Taalij coughed blood, choked once, and then died. The monster collected his ghost.
A blow came from behind. The monster stumbled slightly and turned.
In life, Honn the Warrior had towered over most people, as grizzly as a mountain bear, but the monster looked down on him. So puny and weak. Honn’s mighty battle axe seemed no more threatening than a whittling knife. His forest of beard was split by clenched and broken teeth. He raised his axe with two hands, but before he could strike, the monster’s hammer smashed down on him, over and over, again and again, until Honn was reduced to a steaming mound of red pulp. The silver strands of his s
pirit flowed into the chipped and blocky head of the hammer like slow streaks of lightning.
“No.”
The woman’s voice surprised the monster. It sounded small.
“You cannot keep them.”
Turning to the well at the centre of the square, the monster watched as a woman climbed up and over the remnants of its stonework. She carried a spear. Its head was made of crystal and shaped like a teardrop. Magical energy glowed inside the head, but not just any kind of magic. The monster could taste what the teardrop held. Something it wanted so very, terribly much... a starburst of light filled its vision, searing pain erupted in its head.
“How far would you go to save your friends?” the magician had asked, a lifetime ago in the stale gloom of her lair. “What would you give?”
“Anything. Everything.”
And the magician, addicted to her own power, poisoned by eldritch secrets, longer lived than most humans were supposed to, had found joy in torment, success in misery. “Self-sacrificed is worth more than a hundred ghosts taken by force...”
And Jurin remembered who she was.
The monster, every inch as terrible as she remembered, stood watching as she climbed from the well. Its hair was an unruly mass of thick moss, through which pale antlers sprouted like small trees of bone. The monster’s beard, a nest of roots and vines, reached down to a heavy breastplate of dark wood. Gnarly, lichen-covered bark served as guards for powerful arms and legs. Its exposed skin was ashen and lifeless, sullied by dirt and scars.
Huge, twice the size of most humans, the monster tilted its head to one side, regarding Jurin and the spear with eyes as big as bucklers, filled with a livid, moving green like a forest canopy in a gale. Jurin stared at the massive hammer in its hands and swallowed her fear. Beneath the blood, the stone head carried the silvery sheen of ghosts.
“Never could you hope to stand against the monster, Jurin,” the magician had said. “And while the stars still shine in the sky, you never will.”
The monster made no move. Its forest eyes stared at the glowing spearhead. Its root and vine beard split, revealing a cavernous mouth. A black tongue licked across stalactite teeth obscenely. Slowly, Jurin began to unscrew the teardrop from the spear’s shaft.
“Strike a bargain.” The magician’s words had been filled with dark certainty. “To appease your shame, to end your torment, you must offer the monster what it cannot refuse.”
Jurin dropped the shaft and held the teardrop in both hands. The sterile light of its magic brightened. A groan of desire rumbled from the monster’s mouth.
“My ghost, my spirit,” Jurin shouted, holding the teardrop forward. Her gaze flittered briefly on the bloody remains of her fellow soldiers lying in the mud. “If you release my friends,” she told the monster, “I will give it to you willingly.”
The monster’s grin was a hideous stone-toothed grimace that at once threatened Jurin and acquiesced to her terms.
Balia, Honn, Taalij, Jurin prayed silently. She held the glowing teardrop above her head. Your coward friend brings you peace.
She hurled the teardrop towards the monster. It arced through the air, a tail of light following it. With a howl of triumph, the monster raised the hammer and met the crystal spearhead with a fearsome blow, shattering it with the sound of a thousand damned souls screaming. Freed magic blazed with super nature, blinding Jurin, sending her reeling away with a cry.
And the last thing the magician had said to Jurin rustled through her mind: “The final trick you will play on the monster will be that you have no ghost to give away.” The ancient, poisonous spider had practically delighted in her own cleverness. “I will cut the ghost out of you, Jurin, and replace it with a surprise of my own.”
As the slashes and spots of magical energy cleared from Jurin’s vision, she heard the monster roaring – first with rage, then with panic. The spell the teardrop had released surrounded the giant abomination in a great orb comprised of a thousand lines of white fire. The skin of the monster’s hand hissed and smoked as it touched the burning lines, and it gave a bellow of pain. The hammer sent sparks of energy fountaining to the ground with a series of blows, but try as it might, the monster could not escape the trap. Before long, the hammer shattered and crumbled to powder as fine as stardust.
The orb began to shrink, and the monster with it. Its voice became quieter and quieter until no more than a sigh in the icy air, and the orb, the trap, the prison that tasted like Jurin’s ghost, was once again a crystal teardrop filled with glowing magic.
All around, the strange and treacherous village remained as lifeless and ruined as always; but now a darkness had invaded the stillness, hanging in the air, misshapen and jagged like the shadows between two mountain boulders. A smell assailed Jurin’s nostrils, something ancient, poisonous: the stench of a magician’s lair.
A figure stepped from the darkness. Naked, crippled, blind, one of the magician’s acolytes dragged its feet through the mud, pausing only to pluck the teardrop from the ground before returning to the strange doorway from which it had appeared. As the acolyte carried the teardrop into the darkness, Jurin heard a distant voice like broken glass: “Farewell.” And the wound in the air closed.
All strength fled from Jurin. Her legs buckled and she fell facedown into the mud. With supreme effort, she managed to roll onto her back and gaze up at the sky. Gone was the thick and ugly umbrella the colour of bruised skin. The splendour of the night now greeted her eyes. The moon, a fat silver-blue disc, glared down at her with clean light. The stars, countless pinpricks in a black canvas, winked and glimmered across the sky with majestic messages that only oracles could divine.
This was like seeing music, Jurin decided, a song sung just for her. An alien sensation arose within her and crawled over her body; something she hadn’t felt for so long she barely recognised it at first: peace. The shame, the nightmares, the inner turmoil – they ended here.
Jurin turned her head until her cheek lay flat against the mud. Her eyes filled with tears as she gazed upon the broken bodies of her comrades, her friends, the fellow soldiers with whom she had survived the horrors of war, but not the terror of this village. Jurin’s tears did not come with remorse, though; they fell from her eyes with relief to see thorny tangles of silver wisps rising from their shells.
“I’m sorry I left you here,” Jurin whispered. The ghosts detached from the flesh, hovering in the air as though bearing witness to the soldier lying in the mud. Jurin smiled at them. “I didn’t run this time. I didn’t run...”
Darkness was descending. The last sleep beckoned, and Jurin saw her friends rise towards the glory of the heavens, free and at peace. And then Jurin saw nothing more.
The Giant’s Lady
Rowena Cory Daniells
As we entered the white-walled courtyard, the music stopped and every islander turned.
Wyrd, they whispered.
My lady stood tall, her pale hair glinting in the hot noonday sun. A full-blood T’En throwback, she did not try to hide her hair or her six-fingered hands, and her distinctive wine-dark eyes held quiet defiance. As for me, I was not a Wyrd, not even a half-blood, just a freakishly big True-man, and an ugly one at that.
My lady headed for two seats at the end of a trestle table. By the time we reached it, the table was empty. She sat, turning her long legs to the side. Dropping our travelling bags, I took the opposite seat, where I could watch the courtyard gate.
Wyrd they whispered, and… Plague Bringer.
By chance last spring we’d arrived on Sundowner Isle just as the rose-plague broke out. My lady did what she could but the distinctive rose shaped rash travelled so fast that even a T’En healer could not hold back the tide. Trying to save everyone would have killed her.
On Sundowner Isle she’d advised the king to close the port. He’d refused because the island had been about to host a religious festival. Now, every second trading vessel carried plague across the Lagoons of Perpetual Summer.
> The mandolin player began a tune and conversation gradually resumed. No one came to take our order, meanwhile several people slipped away discretely.
My lady sent me a wry smile. “Shouldn’t be long.”
I loved her.
Had loved her from the day she’d rescued me. As tall as a man at twelve, all I had ever known was cruelty and hunger. I could have grown bitter and hard, instead I’d tried to understand how those who had been physically blessed could find amusement in my humiliation.
The day she’d found them baiting me in a village square she could have walked away, instead she’d offered my master a healing in exchange for me. He’d driven a hard bargain, then reneged on it and tried to capture her for his travelling freak show.
In the past, no matter how he’d beaten me I’d never fought back. That night I held him down while my lady used her gift on him. From then on, whenever he tried to force himself on a woman, his cock would shrivel.
My lady, dispenser of justice. How could I not love her?
Now, ten years later, I had followed her to the end of the world, to King Vonanjiro’s troubled island empire. I’d argued against coming here. War was brewing in the Lagoons of Perpetual Summer. There were too many island kingdoms ruled by ambitious, petty princelings, and they had too many hungry subjects with too little arable land. But when my lady had heard that King Vonanjiro’s only surviving heir was deathly ill, she’d booked passage and, whether she realised it or not, Pinnacle Isle had always been her life’s destination.
“Note the palace, Gyf.”
I’d already done so. To please her, I glanced over the tavern’s red-tiled roof to the grand white building on the island’s only high ground. There were screened verandahs to keep the interiors cool, but other than that it was identical to T’En buildings in the north.
“Pinnacle Palace proves the old stories are true.” In her excitement, my lady clasped my forearm and I felt her gift stir. My heart raced.
According to the stories, T’En power repulsed honest True-people but I loved it. The overflow of her gift made my life more intense, colours richer and scents sharper.
