All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  Captain Brales walks to his side. “And?”

  The flash of steel is almost too quick to see. Captain Brales’s head snaps back. Blood floats on the air like morning mist. Then he slumps, boneless, and the magician toes his body over the edge.

  I fumble for my sword but my fingers are clumsy and slow. The magician is mouthing something that I can’t hear over the heartbeat of the tower. It swells, shaking my teeth, rattling my eyes so the whole world blurs. I try to stand but my legs are numb. The magician says the word again, but all sound is blotted out. The storm is roaring.

  I think he is saying sacrifice.

  ***

  Dawn light broke through the magician’s tent in mosaic patterns of gold and burgundy. I collected my tunic, my armour, my sword. “You won’t tell Captain Brales.”

  “No.” He stretched and smiled. “And neither will you.”

  They were waiting for me at the steps of the lodging house, packed and ready. Captain Brales led us out the gates and into the desert and the people of Gail watched from the windows, thin brown faces hidden in shadow. The magician waited until we were well past the city walls before calling for a stop.

  “Headcloths,” he said, holding up fistfuls of patterned fabric. “Or, as the Moors say, kaffiyeh. There are storms this time of year.” He gave us one each and kept the last for himself. When he reached me he brushed my hand. “Tie them tight. Don’t breathe in the sand.”

  The captain waited till he was done before calling us to attention. “Small century that we are, you are still soldiers. Let’s finish this march well. Slopes!”

  Officer Slopes was bent with exhaustion, as if he had to carry all of us instead of just himself. Captain Brales was the same. Corm dragged his feet, leaving long snake-trails in the sand. The only one walking upright was the magician.

  He glanced back at me, grinned and winked. A little spark of warmth flared inside. He’ll keep me safe. He watches for me.

  Three nights into the desert he came to me.

  He told me of being a child. His first book; leather bound, creaking with age. The crack of a staff across his knuckles when he mispronounced a spell. The ache he held long into the night. Kneeling before the king at fourteen. The war. He was not trapped at Tinnarim through the long siege with Corm and me, but two hundred miles distant, ambushed, screaming with an arrow in his guts. A fellow soldier snapped off the tail and yanked it through the hole in his back, and then the magician sprinkled the wound with one of his own potions and waited to heal or to die.

  “The Ant Tower is the very end,” he said. “It took near two years to find that what the king wanted was hidden there. Two years is a long time to wander.”

  My hands twisted in my lap. “Can you just walk away from the king?”

  “He may grant me some lenience.”

  “If you succeed.”

  “Yes. There is that.” He twined his moustache. “You’re a good man, Parkin. I would see you, after this is done.”

  I started. Memories of the night in Gail were still fresh. The strength in his hands as he pressed me down, and then the softness in the small of his back as I did the same to him. “I… I understand.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t.” Then he smoothed the sand from his robe and returned to his tent.

  ***

  I stagger to my feet. My hand trembles on the hilt of my sword. “Why?”

  He spreads his hands, smiles. “Parkin. I didn’t craft these locks. I’m only here to break them.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “To me, no. To our king, yes. It’s worth all our lives.”

  “So kill yourself!”

  His eyes are hard. “Blood sacrifice, taken unwillingly. I didn’t write the terms. Don’t blame me.”

  “So who did?”

  “A man and his mistress. Sorcerers. Both long dead. They had a fondness for spells demanding a blood price. You wouldn’t know their names.” He stirs the sands in the centre of the plateau with one long finger. “Almost done.”

  “You only brought five robes. Did you know?”

  He ducks his head. “Yes. I knew everything as far as now.”

  “What happens next, then?”

  “I claim the prize.” Then he plunges both hands into the sand, burrowing down until he is elbow deep. Now! Cut his head off and climb down and go home!

  But I can’t move. I want to but I don’t have the strength.

  The sand is up to his shoulders. No. Not just sand but termites, white as drowned flesh. They crawl over his neck and into his clothes, exploring his hair. They skitter across his lips. The drumming of the tower is so loud that the ground pitches back and forth, trying to buck me off.

  Do it! Kill him!

  I can’t.

  The magician crows in triumph and jerks back. Termites fall away, kicking at the air, dying before they touch the sands like his skin is poison. He clasps something to his chest like one would an infant.

  “Is that it?”

  “This is it. Not for you to see.” He tucks his prize away beneath his robes. I swear there is a fluttering under his burnouse. Whatever is hidden there is pulsing, breathing. He stands, swaying with the wind. Or is it the tower swaying beneath him? “One last thing to do,” he says. “Do you think it’ll let us climb back down, Parkin? Or do you think the tower is vengeful?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why you’re asking.”

  “Because I value your opinion. Come over here.” And, even though I resist, even though just to look at him makes me ill, I go to him. We stand together in the epicentre of the plateau, and the winds shriek around us.

  “The final step,” he says, and takes my hand. His touch is cool and soothing and I feel the ache in my chest fall away. “Parkin. I’m sorry. This isn’t my choice. It’s the tower.” Then, before I can move, he brings his hands together. The clap echoes through the storm.

  “Don’t—” I stumble. The sands have turned soft beneath me like molasses, creeping up my legs to the knee. My hands hit and are sucked beneath the surface. I rear back, yank hard. It’s as heavy as stone.

  “Damn you!” I pull until spots of light burst before my eyes. One arm comes free but the sand is already up to my waist. It isn’t just heavy. It squeezes me like a living thing.

  The magician stands before the sun, his shadow long and spider-thin. “The first sacrifice,” he says. “Betrayal of a brother. That wasn’t easy.” He crouches, close enough for me to feel his breath against my face. I grab for him and he jerks back; my fingers brush his nose. The sand is over my hips.

  “Damn you! I’ll kill you!”

  He closes his eyes and whispers, and there is sadness in his words. “The second sacrifice. Not to break the spell, but to placate the tower. Love lost.”

  It’s up to my neck. Something is tugging and pinching at my feet. One boot comes free. All I can see is the hem of his burnouse, slashed and spattered with Brales’ blood. I open my mouth to scream and the sand rushes in.

  The storm slows, the howl fading to a pleased whisper. The magician lowers himself over the side of the tower. The last thing I know is his face, lined with what I hope is guilt. Then the sand closes over and all is darkness, and the heartbeat thrums through my bones.

  It drums and drums and drums.

  I open my eyes.

  There is nothing. The blackness is absolute in all directions. The air scratches my throat. Something tickles in my hair. I stretch out blindly. Space enough to move my arms, but only just. My knuckles crack against stone. I’m in the Ant Tower.

  That thought sends me screaming. I drag my fingers through my hair and termites wriggle between my fingers, gnawing and building their nests.

  Above all of this is the heartbeat, ceaseless and deafening, the drum roll of an army on the march. It rattles my lungs inside my ribcage. Sand drifts down from above as the walls shake.

  Do you hate him?

  It’s a voice scratching inside my head and the answer comes
fast. Yes. I hate him.

  Would you kill him?

  “Yes!” The howl echoes off the walls. “Yes!”

  Would you kill him would you kill would you revenge would you kill him for me

  I recognise it now. It’s the tower, or whatever lives inside. I don’t care which. I remember the night in Gail. That wink. I see the snag of rock breaking in Corm’s hand, and his eyes, wide, disbelieving.

  Kill him. Bring it back.

  “I’ll kill him.” The voice in my head becomes a low buzz, like a child humming a tune. It sounds pleased.

  I see light.

  ***

  Desert under my hands. I squeeze my eyes shut against the sunlight reflecting off the sand. Slowly, very slowly, I reach out. The sand burns my palms. Wind is a cool finger against my cheek. I’m outside.

  I open my eyes. The dunes are white under the dawn. I smell my own sweat and piss. Behind me is the Ant Tower, pitted and twisting. At its base is a fluttering cloth that marks the spot where we piled our armour. There is water in there, and bread, and my sword.

  The voice in my head again. Kill him. Revenge.

  I spit. My mouth is dry as coffinwood. I have a long way to walk before night.

  About The Author

  Christopher Ruz is an Australian author, teacher and stuntman raised on Moorcock, Zelazny and King. He writes across genres, self publishing the fantasy trilogy Century of Sand, the small-town horror serial Rust, and the Olesia Anderson spy thriller series under the pseudonym D.D. Marks. Ruz has too many ideas to fit in his head. He writes most days, and writes most nights, and generally gets on everyone’s nerves because he won’t put that goddamn notebook down. He’s currently working on five books, which is four too many.

  For more information, visit http://www.ruzkin.com.

  Heft

  Brett Adams

  Editor’s Note: Science fiction is not always about exploring the implications of new technologies. In some rare cases, it can show us troubling new uses for tech that already exists.

  The sex snail.

  Meetings with Walt always ended with the sex snail.

  To this day, I don’t know if he was just odd or clinically insane.

  We met every morning I was downtown at Café Le Labyrinthe, and had done so for seven years. Inside if it was raining, otherwise outside at tables that rocked on the fake-cobblestone verge and spilled our lattes.

  It’s not that Walt was a scintillating conversationalist. To be honest, most days he bored me to tears. But every so often, maybe once a month, he brought something with him. An item that marked the day as magic. Like a talisman fallen from another world.

  I hungered for those magic days.

  Our final meeting was one such magic day.

  The item that always turned my day from lead to gold was an envelope. A commonplace, yellow envelope. He would place it on the table and slide it toward me, end-on between the sugar tray and our foamy teaspoons.

  He always used the same envelope, and I was careful to return it the next day, when I had digested its contents. By then, it had become creased and tatty, like an old dollar bill, but one that had only known two owners. He’d tap it once, wink, sip, and scowl. If his first sip hadn’t done it, the second would leave a wisp of foam on his upper lip, caught on the tufts of stubble missed by his razor.

  On the last day, it occurred to me as I took it from his hand that his skin was like that envelope, as if it had adapted to its texture, chameleon-like, through frequent contact.

  Once I knew, I got restless. It was as if I’d stolen a cookie from under Mom’s nose and had to escape to the long grass beneath my mulberry tree.

  I gulped my coffee, which made my eyes water, and sat up straight. He seemed to sense I wanted to go. He shook my hand and took his leave by telling me the story about the sex snail.

  It is the story of a man who takes a pretty shell home and places it in an aquarium with his tropical fish. It fits right in and he admires it over the course of a year or so, until one day his wife returns home to find the top off the tank and the cleaning apparatus out. And beside the aquarium, her husband’s dead body.

  The pretty shell, it turns out, is a cone snail, a little harpoon-shooting mollusc dubbed the cigarette-snail for the time it takes to kill a man. (Biologists, no sense of humor. A historian would have called it a sex snail. I do.)

  I think Walt meant for the story to be a reminder of the need for vigilance or a work-a-day attitude. In the days leading up to our last meeting, his eyes would light up before he told it, as if it had just occurred to him, as though it really was fresh. I didn’t let on he’d told it before. But it did worry me that the CIA chose Walt to courier sensitive information.

  With the envelope secreted in the inner pocket of my coat, I hurried away. I rode the cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf, and drifted through the markets, pretending to hunt for a souvenir. The place was swarming with tourists, and the air was heavy with the scent of salt and clam chowder.

  When I was certain no one had followed me, I escaped back up the hill and into the quiet gloom of dead hour at McAughney’s—my mulberry tree.

  I ordered a tall black and hunkered down in a booth in back, facing the street, which blazed through the doorway in an over-exposed rectangle. The booth afforded me a good view of the whole bar, and to my right was a hall that led to the restrooms and escape. It was all very Don Corleone, I thought, just wrong city, wrong parents.

  I slipped the yellow envelope—a fortune cookie, it occurs to me now—from the folds of my coat, which was just light enough to be inconspicuous in the weather, and laid it on the table. Inside was a dossier. On the cover of the dossier were stamped the words, Top Secret: C-level 6.

  My breath caught.

  A six! Highest I’d had yet.

  The classification made the dossier feel heavy, as if it held sheets of lead. Which, as it turned out, was not so far from the truth.

  Under the classification was a list of names, people I’d never met, and at the bottom Yours Truly, under the field name Cuckoo. No matter how many of those dossiers I’d received, seeing my name always thrilled me.

  I ordered a brandy, pushing the coffee aside. It was poor form at eleven in the morning, but I couldn’t help it. A six! There aren’t many jobs where one can plot one’s progress as simply as by the numbers. In my mind’s eye, my currency was snaking upward like the post-crash Dow.

  The brandy came, and as it bit and swirled over my tongue, it bore a memory. The memory was seven years old, from my last year as a professor of history, and the night I met a man named Nathan Blaylock.

  We met at one of those university-industry mixers that must exist for some reason not visible to my naive eye. Nathan was dumped on me by a passing colleague—I forget who—like train trash, smelling of booze and smiling. He wasn’t drunk though. Someone has spilled brandy on his suit.

  I was barely polite. It was end of semester and my brain was groping after complete sentences like a grizzly after the first salmon. End of semester had felt like a preview of Alzheimer’s for years.

  He didn’t seem to take offence, and before long had manoeuvred me onto my soapbox, whereupon my synapses began firing. I told him I was a history lecturer, and was encouraged when he didn’t grimace. My specialty was the lives of great men, guys whose legacies endured. I offered what I liked to call my “Movers and Shakers” lecture series, about the men and women whose corpses are dragged out every few years to be pumped full of the latest ideology and sent shambling onto our screens: Joan of Arc, the Liberated Woman; Genghis Khan, paragon of supply chain logisticians and Sensitive New Age Moghul; and so on.

  This happened about the time the university began calling students “customers.” Nathan seemed to pick up on my disgust.

  “Seemed to” nothing: he plucked me like a ripe tomato.

  You see, “Nathan Blaylock” wasn’t his real name. And he had the solution to my problem. He offered me a career change.

  How w
ould I like to work for the CIA, he said, as a Non-Official agent. NOs are the guys who don’t technically exist. They are ghost operatives, working without schedules, bureaucracy, and, above all, students. NOs have all the fun of the case research without the term papers.

  Two weeks later I’d resigned and met Walt for my first mission.

  When, seven years later, I opened The Six, I was pleased to notice the job was local, just a shuttle down the coast to L.A. The shine of paid-for travel had long since been dulled by jobs all over the States, and to be tackling my first six on the West Coast gave my confidence a shot in the arm.

  The mission’s target was a German visiting L.A. under the cover of a burgeoning acting career. For Germans, acting usually means voice acting. They have a dubbing industry as big as Hollywood, and those who fancy their chances at the real thing are drawn to California like bimbos to a casting couch. So the cover was plausible.

  The tricky thing about the assignment, what made it a six, no doubt, was that the mission’s window was a single night—five days hence. Which did not seem so plausible, and I briefly wondered if Langley had that right. They’d been wrong before. But it was not my place to question. In fact, it was not even possible to question. Communication with NOs was a mostly one-way street.

  I left McAughney’s, coffee undrunk, and made arrangements for the mission that afternoon. The envelope had not contained a plane ticket or a fake driver’s license. That’s all movie fluff. I had a passable cover as a Time-Life library salesman in semi-retirement. I had the pamphlets, and supposedly got the leads for the distributors to go in with the real materials, lovely hardcover kids books. I’d have bought a set myself if I had kids.

  Four days later I was sitting in the departure lounge of Gate 17, San Francisco Airport. I would arrive in L.A. with a day of ballast, but was antsy to scope out the location before the target arrived. I plugged the guy’s name—Erhard Thait, a Finnish-born German—into my Blackberry and seeded a bunch of sticky internet searches with it. If anything came up on Herr Thait—anything at all on the entire web—my searches would shunt it instantly into my Blackberry’s inbox.