Unfettered II: New Tales By Masters of Fantasy

by Shawn Speakman

  Ezren was never seen again, but the Silver Spear had confirmed his involvement in the Garden. Ezren had been paid not merely to look the other way, but to supply the Jade Masks with children from Sharakhai’s west end. The Spear hadn’t been able to name anyone above Ezren, however. “He never bloody said,” he’d told Dardzada again and again while scratching his black beard nervously, “and I never pressed. Why would I? I follow my orders, I go home, I wake up the next day, and then I do it all over again.” The man hadn’t even known whether Ezren reported to a man or a woman. Tai Lin was no better, which was a shame, for this was something Dardzada dearly wished to know.

  When he was convinced he’d get nothing more from the Spear, Dardzada took him to the corner of the warehouse where the children had been secreted away, slit his throat, and shoved him into the pit. The man had stared up at Dardzada, eyes wide and pleading, but Dardzada had merely walked away. There was no sense keeping him alive. The likelihood that the Silver Spears would protect their own and let him free was simply too great. Besides, he didn’t want the man telling everyone about the soldiers Dardzada had rallied to his cause. Tai Lin, on the other hand, he let live. He did need someone to hand over to the Spears for questioning.

  With the sun set and Floret Row lit only by moonlight, Dardzada entered his home and headed for the stairs leading up to his bedroom. He’d just reached the first step when something crashed into him from behind. Someone rolled him over and struck him hard across the jaw.

  It was Ezren. Dardzada nearly laughed. Of course it was him. Dardzada could see his enraged face by the moonlight filtering in through the front windows.

  “I thought you’d be well into hiding by now,” Dardzada managed to get out through the pain in his mouth.

  “I will be soon enough.” He punched Dardzada again. “But I’ve got a debt to pay, don’t I?” The third time he struck, a keen ringing filled Dardzada’s ears. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t be quite so good as Amir seemed to think you would be. Gods, I should’ve killed you when you had that ridiculous fit!”

  “Why didn’t you?” Dardzada replied.

  “Your act was good, I’ll admit.” He struck Dardzada across the mouth. “I thought you would die of your own accord!”

  Ezren tried striking one more time, but Dardzada caught his wrist and grabbed for Ezren’s throat. Dardzada might have been an old apothecary with pain in his joints, but he wasn’t always so. He was no stranger to the ways of arms and armor, of swords and fists.

  The two of them wrestled on the floor of Dardzada’s shop, each gaining the upper hand for a moment before the other turned the tables. Glass vials and jars crashed to the floor, spilling their contents and filling the air with a mixture of bitter and floral scents.

  Finally, Dardzada shoved the younger man away. Ezren came up in a lithe move holding a long, curving knife in one hand.

  “Does Layth know?” Dardzada asked as he made it to his feet with ungainly movements.

  If Ezren was surprised at Dardzada’s question, he didn’t show it. “Layth doesn’t much care as long as he gets his money.”

  “Does he know about the children?”

  “What does it matter?” Ezren said. “You know I can’t allow you to live.”

  “It matters. How can you have subjected children to this?”

  “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but the city is lousy with them. We hardly know what to do with them all.”

  More than what you’ve done, Dardzada thought. Certainly more than that.

  Ezren took a step forward, brandishing the knife, but before he could take another, Dardzada reached into his left sleeve and retrieved a blowdart hidden there. It was already fitted with a poison-tipped dart, so that all it took was a sharp puff to launch it into Ezren’s neck.

  Ezren spun away, his hand slapping his neck where the dart had struck. He bowed over as if winded, pulling frantically at the dart, but it was barbed and difficult to remove once embedded in the skin. He fell to his knees, then collapsed onto his back with a heavy thud against the floorboards. His muscles would already have started to grow leaden. Soon he would be unable to lift his arm, be unable to speak. His lungs and heart would follow in less time than it took to plead for one’s life.

  Dardzada walked calmly to his side and knelt as Ezren finally managed to pinch the dart between his fingers and pull it free. He looked at Dardzada pleadingly.

  “It’s a deadly poison, I’m afraid. There’s no longer anything you or I can do about it. Now tell me before it’s too late. Was my brother involved in this?”

  Ezren merely stared.

  He slapped Ezren’s reddened face. “Were you paying him? Did he know?”

  In the end, the poison was simply too fast-acting. Ezren’s eyes glazed, and his body fell slack. The blood drained from his face, leaving him looking strangely at peace, a thing that angered Dardzada so much that he stood and kicked the young Spear in the side. “They were children!”

  To this final accusation, Ezren’s lifeless body declined to respond.

  Dardzada stood over him a while, breathing heavily, but then set about making the preparations needed to hide the body, a thing Dardzada had done more times in his life than he cared to remember, but a thing he did gladly in this case. For here was a man who deserved no remembrance.

  No remembrance at all.

  After wrapping two bundles of lemongrass stalks in burlap, Dardzada tied the package efficiently with twine. “Steep it for thirty minutes. Best if he’s in the room when you do it. Tell him to breathe deeply.” The ancient woman on the far side of the counter accepted the bundle with shaking hands. “Then remove the stalks and boil it down by half. Use it in a stew of white meat—pheasant, chicken, fish if you can find it—but never red. No beef, no goat. Understand?”

  The woman nodded and put the lemongrass into a bag slung over her shoulder, then left, leaving Dardzada finally, blessedly, alone.

  It had been a long day. Not so busy as a festival day, but busy all the same. Perhaps the gods were shining upon him, balancing the scales.

  While Dardzada was noting the transaction in one ledger and adjusting his inventory numbers in another, the front bell jingled. The door creaked softly open, then closed with a clatter. Heavy footsteps drummed an uneven gait over the floorboards, and someone with an impressive heft to his frame sat on one of the stools on the far side of his desk.

  “I’ve got some mustard oil and camphor you could use for your gout, Layth. Perhaps some ginger tonic like the old women use.”

  Layth, never one to accept help unless it was demanded, replied, “My gout is well enough, little brother.”

  Dardzada finished the line he was recording, then returned the vulture quill to its inkwell and regarded Layth. “At least go to the market a few times a week. Suck on some lemons. It’ll help.”

  Layth’s broad face was unmoved. “Another flight of children were found in a second warehouse near the southern harbor.”

  Dardzada was unsurprised, but relieved. “Hedging their bets.”

  Layth nodded. “We found twenty in the ring.” He shrugged. “Some were killed in the act of apprehension. Others are awaiting their date with the Lord Chancellor himself.”

  Dardzada’s brows raised of their own accord. “The Lord Chancellor. The Kings are taking note, I see.”

  “They are.” Layth let the words hang between them for a moment before continuing. “The investigation was wrapped up nicely with the information you and the woman who somehow managed to survive the attentions of your convenient allies provided.”

  Dardzada shivered at the memory of those children, how frail they’d looked.

  “So where did you come by them, these friends of yours?” Layth asked.

  “I have friends all over this city. It wasn’t difficult to rally them to my cause.”

  “And yet you’ve given my lieutenant no names. Even to Ozan, your trusted servant, you gave nothing.”

  Dardzada laughed. “I didn’t know
who I could trust, Layth. I still don’t.”

  “Come, the danger is over. Surely you can tell me.”

  “I’ll not tell anyone from the Silver Spears, and that includes you.”

  Layth frowned, making his jowls puff out unflatteringly. “Six Spears fell that morning, Zada.”

  “All of them complicit in that crime. Whatever happened to those guardsmen that day, they deserved it, and worse.”

  Layth tipped his head, as close to agreement as Dardzada was going to get. “The Lord Commander of the guard demands answers.”

  “Then give them to him! Ezren and his men were taking coin to steal children from the west end of our city! He was feeding them to those merciless bastards! You’ve done well! You’ve removed a terrible stain from this city—a thing any man should be able to spin into a tale that would leave the Lord Commander more than satisfied, a thing I’m sure you’ve managed before, Layth. The only thing I’d be worried about is whether the Commander believes his captain involved in the crime.”

  Dardzada watched Layth carefully at this. He wanted to know—he needed to know—whether Layth was involved. But either Layth knew nothing or he’d been anticipating this. “Of course his captain knew nothing of it.” He lifted the bulk of his frame from the stool and smoothed his soft, white uniform down. “But tell me this, Zada, if the Lord Commander demanded a more thorough investigation, would he find that the Moonless Host, the scourge of this city, were involved in the attack on the Spears that day?”

  And now it was Layth watching Dardzada for signs of a lie. But this was a lie Dardzada had been telling for years. It was a lie he’d be telling until the day he died. Layth had no more hope of catching him at it than anyone else in this city did.

  “Of course he wouldn’t,” Dardzada replied.

  “And what of our good Ezren?”

  “What of him?”

  Layth sighed. “Have you seen him, Zada?”

  “Neither hide nor hair. And good riddance to him.”

  Layth hardly weighed him. He stared for the span of a breath, his expression more relieved than anything else. “Children . . . Such a terrible tragedy.”

  “Yes,” Dardzada said.

  “Why did you say the girl, Çeda, left you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s right. You didn’t.” A cruel smile distorted Layth’s already-smug face—a smile that, despite Dardzada’s years of practice at hiding them away, brought on a host of bitter memories.

  Without another word, Layth turned and left Dardzada’s apothecary.

  The bell jingled. The door clattered shut.

  John A. Pitts

  * * *

  Much of my writing explores the nature of families and the concepts of love and loss. My mother was born in a little Kentucky town called Nonesuch, about as small a place as you can find. To her the world beyond her own was full of wonder and beauty. She was always intrigued by Japanese art and culture, considering them to be the pinnacle of exotic splendor. Of course, this influenced my thinking as I grew up.

  I learned of Aokigahara, or the suicide forest, decades ago and filed it away with everything else I hoard in my vast memory of esoteric and nearly useless facts. So when I wanted to write a story of our growing social isolation in the internet age, juxtaposed against the fragile concepts of love, I gathered bits from the miasma of my experiences to create a plausible world where I could explore these themes.

  Though we lost her far too soon, I can still hear my mother’s voice of support and encouragement. With the story “Aokigahara,” I sought to honor her curiosity and her deep sense of love she had for her children. Miss you mom. You’d have liked this one.

  John A. Pitts

  Aokigahara

  John A. Pitts

  Physics is the basis of all life. It explains everything from the orbits of the planets to the currents in the seas and the power of a heartbeat. Every atom in the universe is connected to every other through an intricate web of gravity and electrical impulses, dark matter and quantum filaments. There are those who believe that through an understanding of physics we can begin to unravel the beauty in a sunset or the way looking into your lovers eyes makes you heart beat faster. They claim it’s about the flow of energy, from one relevant body to another. These, however, are senseless platitudes, not backed by real science. Science fiction, perhaps. Gibberish for the masses. If anything, scientific theory backs up the stark reality that there is no such thing as love.

  Michi Kimura reread her blog post and sent it out into the ether where she knew it would garner a million hits, each one adding a micro-yen to her account. She understood it was a cultural balancing act. Pride and audacity led to shame and societal disapproval, but her combined heritage helped her straddle the divide between Eastern sensibilities and Western ideals. Sometimes fame created its own honor. Besides, the money, as small as it was, helped augment against the time when she would fall out of favor and the lectures and research would dry up. There was always another with enough audacity and intelligence to take her place in the pantheon of math and science gods.

  With that bit of screed done for the morning, she moved on to her various mail servers. The Japanese government had all but given up on control of the ether space and left it to the capitalists. That and the cartels in renegade countries allowed her to filter her correspondences without raising the suspicions of the various international governing bodies. It wasn’t like she had anything particular to hide, it was more the game that one must play for legitimacy.

  After a few moments filtering her latest correspondences, she had a single contact that looked interesting. It was another encrypted cipher. One of several she got each week. She knew it was probably another attempt by the American intelligence services to coax her away from academia and into the world of patriotic code breaking, but she had no ties back to the States. Since her parents’ deaths she’d lived an intense if secluded life in Japan. Her loyalties lay more with Ptolemy, Einstein, Newton, Curie, and Hawking than any world government. Besides, her thirty-by-thirty apartment—inherited from her parents—was all the home she needed now. It provided her with a physical address and infrastructure to house her quantum servers. They were where she truly lived, the ever-expanding geography of her virtual worlds and her ethereal constructs that filled them. When she craved the company of others, she would flow into one of a million other virtual networks and playgrounds that replaced the mundane existence she had in meat space.

  She toyed with this morning’s encoded missive, debated on whether she should just flush it through her spam shredder, breaking it down so that even the electronic sub-strata would be indecipherable to the best supercomputers in Beijing and London.

  She dragged the encrypted message over to her shredder and paused as a moment of absurdity flicked across her mind. The Americans had given up their technological edge decades prior, when their last cultural revolution nearly destroyed their scientific infrastructure. A generation later, remnants of that old intelligentsia had come out of hiding, overthrown the religious state and began reinstituting a form of capitalist neutral democracy. These dreamers worked to bring back the scientists and technologists who’d fled to other countries and tech havens, but the memory of the pogroms and mass executions had sealed the fate of the great American empire. Any hope of bringing home the patriotic was a wistful fantasy. She was a lost cause, one of the brightest scientific minds of her age. Bringing her into the fold would restore hope for the wistful, but that hope was waning. Which is why they barely tried these days, often giving her the simplest skip pattern codes, hoping to catch her attention, just to keep the dance from becoming a complete farce. Both sides knew the other was onto the scam, but the game had to be played out, or all hope for an American resurgence was lost.

  She stared at the encrypted message, astonished and impressed. For the first time in nearly a year, they had sent her something to consider. The first three characters were not even English. She could deciph
er English language codes in her sleep, but this one had a slight variation, as if it were poorly translated English language. Was it an alternate reversal pattern, from German, no wait, English to German to . . . Japanese. Or . . . she really concentrated on the message, the way the letters moved from right to left . . . curious . . . Not right to left, left to right.

  Okay, she was intrigued. She dropped the message into a workspace and began unpacking the rather complex algorithm into individual quantum decouplers. She deciphered first the English, then the German before she had enough to complete the transformation.

  She was so engrossed with this new puzzle that she ignored her alarm alerting her that her maximum in-verse capacity had been reached and that she needed to get out of the umbilical cocoon and hit the treadmill. Or maybe the rowing machine. Something to keep her muscles from atrophying further, keeping her circulation working, and allow her mind, a construct of chemicals, proteins, and electrical impulses, to ease back from the hyper-vigilant state she maintained while in the ether. Three times a day she worked her body, keeping it in appropriate physical conditioning to allow her time in-verse. She’d known others who’d lost themselves to the lure of the infinity and died while jacked in. The brain needed down time and the body fed the mind. Twice she reset the alarm until finally the overrides she had in place pushed her away from her virtual workspace and the physical world began to reemerge.

  She climbed out of the cocoon with a sigh, and a slight pulsing in her temples. Too much, she chided herself. The brain needs glucose. She risked the proverbial hangover if she didn’t do something about it soon. The walls in her habitat blossomed to life with images of mathematical formulae and colorful representations of atoms and galaxies.