Arcane

by Nathan Shumate

  Sheng bowed to the kiln master, and watched him vanish into the anagama. Then he turned to face the west, peace filling his heart as he prepared to perform his final service to the God of the Kiln.

  It was then the earth began to shake.

  Jolted from his meditation, Sheng looked to the anagama only to see the tunnel collapse. Crying out, he cast his eyes towards the crest of the great hill, in time to see the chimney that vented the smoke tumble into a pile of rubble.

  Fighting for balance on the unsteady ground, Sheng forced his way up the great hill, hoping that some small crevice would open, some place he could slip through to give himself to the God of the Kiln, as well.

  As he mounted the hill, the shaking grew greater. Soon he could see cracks opening on the steep seaward face, venting inky smoke and clouds of ash. Then the hillside itself began to bulge. Clinging to a stony prominence, Sheng cried out to the God of the Kiln, begging forgiveness for failing in this most sacred task.

  With a thunderous roar that nearly shook Sheng loose from his perch, the hillside erupted, sending earth and stones flying into the surf far below. The shaking finally grew still. Smoke cascaded from the cavernous space left behind, choking and blinding Sheng until it was borne away by the sea winds and he saw….

  The statue was black.

  Surely, Sheng thought, surely it is ash on the statue, or a trick of light and smoke—the God of the Kiln must be of shining white porcelain!

  With scalded eyes, Sheng began to make out the massive form of the God of the Kiln….

  Wrong! It was all wrong! Where was the look of gentle benediction, the wisdom, the satisfaction of a god pleased with his people?

  No. The visage Sheng beheld was terrible. The brows bore down heavily on eyes like those of a venomous serpent. The nose was squashed and flared, with smoke trickling from the nostrils as though some fire still raged deep within. The mouth gaped, slavering, a forked tongue lolling from between uneven fangs.

  The body, too, was grotesque, malformed like a child born from a poisoned womb. Its skin appeared in turns scaly and warty. From hunched shoulders sprang sinewy arms ending less in hands than the talons of some bird of prey. The torso rested upon mismatched legs, each twisted unnaturally as though wrenched out of place, and terminating in split and misshapen feet.

  But worst for Sheng to behold were the bodies scattered upon the stone shelf about the idol’s feet—the bodies of the Blossom People, themselves contorted into the most horrible positions. Even from his high vantage point, Sheng saw that those bodies had never burned upon entering the anagama. His people had made their way past the inferno and through the choking smoke, only have their souls ripped from them at the feet of their god.

  Of his god, Sheng realized. His god, who had spared him from the kiln so the shenzhi could see what his humble pride had wrought.

  Sheng stood then, and stepped into the air. Denied communion with the God of the Kiln, the last of the Blossom People cast himself into the sea below, where the surf eagerly took him in to pound him upon the rocks lining the shore.

  You are very quiet, my friend.

  Yes, even from here you can see the bodies—calcified into stone, yet that does not make them any less… disturbing. And that idol—it may only be an infidel’s folly, but I grant you, even we of the One True Faith must shudder at its sight. We should do well to let it remind us that humility, even, can be taken too far.

  Yet it serves its purposes. No captain of an islander ship will ply these waters of his own accord, but ours is well-paid to risk skirting this cursed shore. There is a fine anchorage just around the point, and between us we have brought enough sons and nephews to man both longboats. By dawn our hold will be stocked with the best clay ever to have been dug from the earth.

  And then it is back to civilized lands. I met a most intriguing artisan when last I was summoned to the Caliph’s court. He and his students were working miracles with our rude clays. I long to see what he might do with porcelain that was the gift of a god!

  TIED

  D.T. Kastn

  Day seven of the westward trek. Paul looked a little the worse for wear. Which was understandable, because she’d trussed him up like a Christmas goose, or turkey, whichever bird was available that season—point was, his hands and ankles were tied. Though Lidy removed the gag after he agreed to stop swearing at her in Latin, his jaw was near immobilized on account of the position he was in. She’d slung him half alongside the donkey, and the contorted sounds he was making were probably complaints of a headache, from banging against the beast’s bony shoulder.

  “This is what happens when you turn all evil and whatnot,” she told him. “You get a headache, and the world doesn’t care.”

  He managed to say a short phrase, which may or may not have been Latin, and may or may not have been a curse. She paused a moment to rest, and also to wrap the donkey’s feed bag around Paul’s head. He was not appreciative. There was a lot of spluttering while the oats invaded his nostrils and his gaping mouth.

  She mounted again, and they rode on.

  The donkey was strong, taller than usual for such an animal. All to the good. She hadn’t been able to afford a horse, at the beginning of this manhunt, this shindig, this near-fiasco of epic proportions—but she’d be able to afford one now. Maybe even one of those little two-seater train cars, the kind that got pulled around the country so everyone could look and stare and gawk and gradually die of jealousy.

  There was no denying that the payload was worthwhile. Eventually she took pity on him, or on the donkey, and transferred the feed bag to its rightful owner. She’d soon be stopping for the night, anyhow—just up the road was the inn where she’d tracked Paul down in the first place. She tugged the loudly munching donkey along, and Paul made a hissing noise from his uncomfortable perch. Lidy grinned, because understanding or no, some things were universal.

  Kemmick was at his post (to the right of the gate, feet up, sleeping) and she had to kick his shoes a few times before he sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes. Pretending to have been more deeply asleep than he actually was, purely to make her feel guilty. She didn’t.

  “The ass is back,” she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. Kemmick peered through the gate at the huddled mass in the darkness.

  “And you brought the donkey,” he said.

  “There’s room, I’m assuming?”

  “One. Or two, if it really does turn out to be food poisoning, but—” He stopped, gave a sharp grin. “But you’ll want to keep an eye on the prize, eh? I remember.”

  It wasn’t personal experience that made her so memorable. She’d only ever stopped here the once, on the way through. But she’d said what she was after, and why, and what she would do with it when she caught it. All the luck was Lidy’s; the doom was Paul’s.

  “One room,” she said, and stepped back out onto the highway to retrieve the donkey’s reins, pulling the creature in after her and not-quite-on-purpose scraping Paul’s back against the gatepost. He twisted, grunted, but said nothing. Kemmick stood over him to scrutinize his face, then snorted. Spat.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does he?”

  “He’s a little bloody,” said Lidy, cheerfully, unloading her pack. She slung it over her shoulder and set to unstrapping the buckles and belts that held Paul to the donkey’s side. “He took some tackling.”

  Kemmick looked at her prize, looked at her, got a grin on his face that she wanted to punch off.

  “I’ll bet,” he said.

  In lieu of actual violence, since she was tired, she swiped his hat from his head and tossed it into the water trough. He yelped. She laughed. The last of the restraints came loose and Paul slid messily, gracelessly to the ground; such a contrast to his earlier movements—before she caught him, before the ropes—that she felt the hurt in her own bones, bruises where she couldn’t see them. Lidy was tough, though. She leaned over him to look in his dark eyes.

  “Beddy-bye,” she said, sweetly
.

  Paul said something she didn’t understand. He was always saying things she didn’t understand.

  “No back-talk, now.” She hustled him upwards, a hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, and he stumbled slightly against her. He was surprisingly warm. Kemmick left off wringing out his hat to take the reins of the donkey. He paused in the light from the stables, and pointed.

  “No gag.”

  “No.”

  “You let him talk? I thought it was too dangerous.”

  “I can’t understand him. He’s harmless. To me. Besides.” She gestured to the ropes around Paul’s wrists, his ankles, the neatly tied knot around his waist. “This is what makes the difference. Not the muting, but the immobilizing. Watch him hop, now.” She slid a hand through the tight rope at his waist, palm against him, grazing the zipper on his jeans with her fingers, and pulled gently. “Come on, now. Nearly there.”

  Paul hopped. Uncomplaining, mouth shut, making no noise. But he blinked his beautiful dark eyes rapidly, and while his face didn’t change there was a word there, waiting to be said, and as silent and foreign-language-y as it was, she got it. It wasn’t nice at all. She tugged downwards, pulled harder on the rope.

  “Can make him dance, too, when I want.” She tossed a grin across to Kemmick in the doorframe. “It’s like having a trained bear.”

  It was all bravado; Kemmick might have sensed it. But he didn’t know her near enough to say for sure. And she wouldn’t tell him, wouldn’t say how when Paul moved, alone and under his own power, there was something beautiful. And she wouldn’t admit how, when his voice was soft and he wasn’t cursing, there was something slow and strange, building in her brain like he was an architect.

  Now was the night, though, and the tightly tied knots around wrists, ankles, waist. She could pull him any which way she wanted. He still had donkey oats in his hair.

  “Notorious,” she told him, “that’s you. And where’s it got you now, Paolo?”

  He said nothing; the nothing was the loudest thing she’d ever heard.

  “Nowhere,” she said, though he knew it, she knew it, Kemmick knew it, the donkey knew it, they all knew it and it couldn’t be unknown, but somehow she still had to say it out loud. He had come very close to escaping, after all. The beauty in voice and movement, and the shapes his fingers made in the air and the smoke and then he’d said something that sounded very much like Thrall.

  Well. He was roped now. Fit to be tied.

  “Good luck,” called Kemmick, while she was still talking herself back into confidence, and he shut the door to the stables. Lidy led her prisoner to the inn to be bunked down for the night.

  Kemmick’s esteemed boss, the landlord of the inn at Gloucester Stop, the part-owner of three more at Herrick, Endlebright Canyon and Wheelbelt, respectively, the progressive, forward-thinking marijuana farmer—he was terrible at it, had no sense of crop rotation, he was in it for the money but the bucks got most of it, happiest deer anywhere—was waiting for her. Lidy’s reputation was a sneaky thing; the bad raced ahead of the good to fill the crevices in the wall of public opinion. The landlord had one thing to say to her.

  He said it.

  “Payment in advance.”

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Mr. Gostenyar,” said Lidy, mostly pleasantly.

  “This is only the second time that you’ve come here.”

  “Well, two out of two is something of a record, isn’t it?” She took Paul’s arm, like they were a courting couple, blushing dates at a dysfunctional prom night, and led him up to the counter. Her grip was possessive, and if it weren’t for the cords binding him, their relationship might easily have been badly mistaken. Even with the cords, there were sideways glances. Maybe especially with the cords. Lidy guided Paul onto a square-seated stool at the bar, and slid onto the next one. “It’s perfectly safe, by the way. There’s no way he can get free.” She grinned at Paul, who dropped his chin and said something softly that she couldn’t hear.

  “So.” Gostenyar put his hands on his bar in front of him, an echo of Lidy’s possessiveness. He held a towel in one hand, not to wipe the spilled puddles of beer on the bar, but to complete the picture of jolly country landlord. Gostenyar was not above a little light deception, in the same basic way that the ocean is not above Mount Everest. Except for that one year. Bad storms. Bad joss.“This is the highwayman, eh?”

  “Highwayman, magician, hypnotist, rogue gynecologist, you name it.” Paul’s eyes flickered over to her for a brief second, and she gripped his arm a little more tightly, digging her fingers in. “Responsible for eight deaths, all told.”

  “Rogue gynecology?” suggested Gostenyar, dry as a nice white wine.

  “Some things went wrong,” said Lidy, quieter now, a little less boisterous. “And some things went right. Robbery, wasn’t it, Paul? And jealousy, and hunger, once. And spite.” Her fingers dug a little deeper still. “And love.”

  Paul looked at her; his lips twitched, shaped a word, and then were still. He would have removed her hand from his arm but his hands were bound together, he would have pushed her from him and run but he couldn’t move any faster than a zombie shuffle. He dipped his head, he dropped his eyes, and he said something else more quietly still. Lidy decided she needed a drink.

  “Beer,” she said. Gostenyar ignored her. He rubbed at the sad excuse for a mustache ringing the periphery of his upper lip, climbing steadily if hopelessly up the side-slopes of his nostrils.

  “You’re sure he won’t escape.”

  “With me watching him? Come on, Mr. Gostenyar.” She studied him briefly. “I’m good at my job,” she went on, softly, “and my clients are paying very well to bring this man to justice. Besides which.” She tugged again at the knot at his waist. “This is the only thing he can’t magic himself out of. I got him into it, I’m the only one that can get him out.”

  Gostenyar eyed her, chewing slowly on nothing in particular. Perhaps his tongue. “You’re sure about that?”

  “I have it on the best authority. He’s been around, you know. He’s left traces. Everyone has weaknesses. Nobody’s invincible.” Her fingers slid lightly over Paul’s sleeve, almost a caress, a physical endearment. She looked as though she wanted to kill him, very much.

  “It’s made from what?”

  “It’s not the what, it’s the where.” She smiled briefly; it didn’t touch her eyes. “It’s a magic rope, Mr. Gostenyar. Do you really need specifics?”

  “You’re staying one night only?”

  “That’s all,” she promised. “And we’ve got a long way to go, so we’ll be out of your hair early.”

  “And you’ll pay in advance.”

  She waited, but so did he.

  “Fine. I pay in advance.” She dug through her pockets, Gostenyar watching avidly. The money appeared piece by piece on the counter; he switched his gaze to Paul, who looked at him calmly.

  “What are they going to do with him?”

  “To him,” said Lidy, then shrugged. “They’ll hang him, first. This is the rope.” She paused in her pocket-diving to slide a finger lovingly along the bindings on Paul’s wrist. “Then they’ll cut his head off. You never know with these types. Necromancy’s the norm these days. You know?”

  “No,” said Gostenyar. Lidy stacked the coins up, five inches high, and gave them a last lingering look.

  “Nothing’s what it used to be,” she said wistfully.

  “Thank God for that.” Gostenyar was fervent. Paul whispered something, and Lidy became strangely vibrant, watching him.

  “I told you to stop it,” she said. Paul only shook his head.

  Gostenyar said, “The problem?”

  “Him.” She jerked a thumb at the captive murderer. “Always talking like that.”

  Gostenyar shrugged. “He was only agreeing with me.”

  Lidy leaned on the bar, squinting hazel eyes at the landlord. “You speak Latin?”

  Gostenyar lifted both arms, hands in the air flat an
d outstretched as if to indicate complete abdication of responsibility for his knowledge of dead languages. But he said, “Who speaks Latin? He’s not speaking Latin. That’s Alguin. He’s speaking old Alguin. I know a little, here and there; we get some traders coming by now and then, so it pays.”

  Lidy turned to Paul, slowly; he looked at her solemnly. He didn’t appear to have perked up at all, hearing the landlord speak of his home tongue. Lidy jabbed him lightly with her finger.

  “So you weren’t cursing at me in Latin. Instead, cursing at me in Alguin. I had no idea.”

  Paul said something else, still quietly, and Lidy turned to the landlord, who shook his head.

  “I can’t get it all. It’s marginal at best, what I know. Although the first things you learn are often the curses.”

  “Try,” she told him. Gostenyar hesitated.

  “He says he wasn’t cursing at you, I think, though I can’t imagine why.”

  Paul spoke on.

  Gostenyar said, “And he says it wasn’t love.”

  Lidy looked to the landlord, briefly, wildly, then back at Paul. “What?”

  Gostenyar said, “The murder. He never did it for love. He would never hurt someone he loved.” He shrugged. “Or so he says. You never can trust them, though, can you. These types.”

  Lidy looked down at the ropes, reached a decision.

  “Good night. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us, tomorrow. And a thousand days after that, it feels like.” She was nervous, unsettled; the boisterous pride had slipped away to be replaced by a strange kind of sullen energy, as though some vital wires within her had been stripped and the ends spliced together. She tugged Paul down from his stool, picked up her pack, moved toward the stairs at the back of the inn.

  Upstairs, Lidy led her captive to the only open door, second one from the end on the left-hand side. The other inhabitants of the inn were downstairs, their valuables—such as they might be—safely tucked away under beds and in closets, doors locked. The two of them were alone on this floor, and their steps echoed in the same way, a footfall duet. Lidy shoved Paul into the room first, and he moved quietly to stand in the middle, looking around him. The fine clean line of his jaw worked a bit, briefly, but he said nothing. Lidy stepped in after him, shouldering the door to, holding her pack with both hands.