Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  Yes.

  Digjan is what Dig could have been, given a different life. Dig’s legacy will forever be the brutality of the cartel she inflicted on the Undercity and Cries. But she has another legacy you should know: myself, Jak, Gourd, our circle. Most of all, Digjan is her legacy.

  The wounds inflicted by the cartels go back for more than a century. Let this new generation put an end to the grief that has plagued my people. I mourn Dig, but I lost her long before she died; it happened the day she took over the cartel. In her daughter, I see what the sister I knew could have become. Let the cycle of violence end with this generation.

  If my record proves anything about officer candidates from the Undercity, it is that we can excel in Imperial Space Command. Digjan has the potential to go beyond anything I ever achieved. She could become a leader for all of our peoples, regardless of our origins.

  Let us begin a new cycle, one of hope.

  Sincerely,

  Major Bhaajan, Ret.

  Pharaoh’s Army of the Skolian Imperialate

  Imperial Space Command

  The Blue Widow

  J.P. Sullivan

  It was good tea, all things considered, and I really did admire his efforts at being a good host—but the fact was, I was there to kill him. This was, unfortunately, something of a trend in the profession.

  He spoke with the confidence of his kind. “You’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  “You’ve poisoned me,” I agreed.

  That gave him pause. “You knew?”

  “It was a necessary professional consideration,” I told him.

  He didn’t have much to say to that. A clock ticked somewhere in the back of the parlor. A very fashionable parlor, full of the most fashionable things. Flock wallpaper, teakwood furniture, a sideboard from somewhere in the unpronounceable east. Beyond the damask curtains I heard carts and voices echo over widening streets. Master Zaleski was a well-heeled fellow.

  He was also a monster.

  “I’ve made a good life for myself here,” he said. “I’m an upstanding member of the community.”

  I set the teacup down. “You ate that choir boy.” I’d found his bones in a church-side grotto. “Do you even remember?”

  Dark streaks bloomed like ink at the corners of his clear, blue eyes. “Do you remember all your loaves of bread?”

  Well, I suppose he had a point.

  “This was my week,” he went on. “My year. My work’s in the most exclusive salons.” His skin, at first too pale, turned now to charcoal grey. “But you.” The voice now grated like grinding stone. “You’d ruin it all. I know what you are.” Claws extended from his fingertips, one at a time. The flesh split audibly. “You’re a Blue Widow.”

  My order has a reputation among creatures like him. Not a vampire—some kind of striga, I thought. “I suppose this means finishing my fitting is out of the question?”

  “You’ll be dead in three minutes.”

  On the table I placed my very particular sword. “How fortunate. I only need two.”

  I drew ancient steel.

  Two howls filled the room: The cry of the striga, and the keening of a King’s Blade.

  The striga struck first. He came fast as bowshot, low and hunched and hungry. I pivoted; claws caught; the bustle of my dress shredded in their wake. Pain bloomed where one claw’s edge lanced my thigh.

  I liked that skirt, I thought, then cursed myself for indulging the complaint. The striga was coming back again. Even with the sword’s power, an unfocused moment could be deadly. Even an armiger, even a Widow, would die to a striga’s bite. I’d seen it happen.

  So I urged the sword for power. Reluctantly, it yielded. I felt the thrill of it, the seductive heat. Time slowed, ever so subtly, as I watched the striga lunge. Thin and bloodless lips revealed his razored maw.

  My sword caught his claws. Light flashed at the impact. We both screamed defiance.

  I twisted in, pushing for leverage. I felt resistance as my blade bit slowly through the hard flesh of a grasping palm.

  Howling, he twisted back, spine agile as a cat’s.

  My steel was stained with black, but I did not relent. My boot took his chest before another claw could catch. I near cried for pain—the cut I’d already suffered split wider with the effort. Blood ran warm along my leg. A leg that gave out.

  Stupid. Every woman should know her limits. I fell to a knee and tangled against an expensive chair.

  Then I noticed the tingling in my fingers. The slow numbness creeping up my arms.

  “I can see it in your veins,” the striga taunted me.

  “Two minutes,” I reminded him, one corner of my mouth turned down.

  “Just lie there.” He smiled a fanged smile. “Let it happen. I can see it—the thing you did, all those years ago. This will be a mercy.”

  His words were all the motivation I needed. Leg aching, veins burning, I pushed to my feet. Overhead, I held my sword, both hands to the pommel.

  The striga widened his stance. Our eyes met. He jumped.

  My sword howled loud and then louder, wind and light awhirl around the blade. My elbows shuddered. My knuckles ached. And closer, closer came the claws.

  Then I struck.

  Steel and power and anger caught the striga’s brow. I shattered leathern flesh and iron bone.

  When he hit the ground, he had nothing left that you could call a face.

  Two minutes, surely.

  Fingers trembling, I fetched a powder from my purse. I would not falter. Would not gasp. These were not luxuries allowed a Widow, and tears the least of all. I poured the powder in the monster’s tea and drank it.

  The antidote took time to settle.

  I looked around the ruins of the shop and wondered who might finish my dress.

  #

  Striga:

  The risen and hungry dead. Strigoi are sometimes born of those who die with their life’s work unfulfilled, but more often from dark magic. Concealed behind a pleasing mask of skin, they secretly hunger for the flesh of mortals, the sole thing that can sustain their accursed body. Strigoi have been known to resume their mortal lives and hide for years, only to suddenly snap and devour their own kin.

  (From Astronarius’ ‘Monsters of Molovia’)

  #

  “You killed a tailor,” said the Mother Superior.

  “He was a striga.”

  “You killed the most popular tailor in the entire country.”

  I couldn’t really fault the popularity. I was wearing one of his dresses; it was top work. Did I derive a certain satisfaction from knowing it was the very last one he’d ever put together? Maybe a little.

  Somewhere in the Temple the bells were tolling. Services progressed out beyond the office’s echoing stone.

  The Mother Superior struck the desk. Her teacup rattled in its saucer. “We have procedures. There should have been an investigation.”

  “And by then,” I said, dipping my tea-bag beneath warm water, “He’d have been halfway to the next county, snacking on toddlers all the way. This wasn’t a tessin or a kikimora. Strigoi are clever.”

  “You took a hunt without a letter of marque. There was no bounty, Teresa.”

  Ah. And there it was.

  “You’re one of the better hunters in the Order. But you don’t understand economy. You don’t understand our code!”

  “No marque is necessary,” I said, “When a Widow acts in self-defense.” The poison, I mentioned, was a professional consideration.

  “I imagine you think antivenin of that caliber grows on trees.” The Mother exhaled.

  It’s not that I didn’t understand her position. But I hoped I never sat a desk so long that I forgot what the real work was. Ledgers, balances—who had any use for that when people were dying? Besides which, I’d look positively awful in a nun’s habit. I was lucky that I got sent to a lay order; the Order of the Blue Cross had little patience for clerical vows.

  “I knew you would be trouble
the moment you were chosen by that sword,” the Mother groused. “Everyone who’s ever carried it has been trouble.”

  Without children, without a trade or a fortune, joining the clergy seemed really the only sensible choice. They let widows remarry in the south, I’m told, but in the Temple marriage is eternal, binding beyond death. Better a sister than a spinster, I figured.

  Of course, every clerical novice is tested for possible sympathy to relics. I was no exception. It was my lot to be chosen by a Blade’s whim. I tried to insist on the convent regardless; they wouldn’t let me go. You can’t hurt monsters with common steel, they told me. They needed every Blade. I must wear the Blue.

  I was not a killer, I’d insisted, not a hunter.

  But the first time I spilled blood, something awakened in my own.

  “So give me a contract,” I said. “A proper one. Marqued.”

  Just like that, I’d fallen for the Mother’s trap. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I have just the thing.” She handed a letter of marque to me, already stamped with my personal seal.

  I looked at it. It spoke of disappearances, deaths, mysterious circumstances. A hamlet in need of an expert investigator and monster hunter. Exactly the sort of thing to excite my imagination and occupy my mind. So why, then, was the Mother’s smile so cruel?

  “It’s in Molovia. Bit of a trip, but we already had your things packed.”

  My stomach sank. “Molovia?”

  “East Molovia, as a matter of fact.” Oh, no. “A little village called Elik. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

  “I have some familiarity.” I hadn’t been for seven years. I’d resolved never to go back.

  It was where my family lived. It was where my husband died. It was home.

  I couldn’t think of any place worse.

  “Your train leaves in fifteen minutes,” said the Mother, smiling as she produced my ticket.

  #

  Molovia is an entire country in the sky. In the City that’s romantic; in Molovia it is necessary. Ten months of twelve, the land is swallowed up by a single storm, a tempest as mysterious as it is reliable. Clouds choke the hollows and the valleys. Thunder tears at anyone who journeys on the roads. Were there not so many buttes, no one could ever have lived in such a dreary land. Each village, each farm, becomes an island built on high—full of people who might spy one another through a telescope, but never speak face-to-face.

  It wasn’t until I left that I realized how queer that was. The storm broke but once a year, and all the times between seemed like dreaming. Every Storm’s End brought fevered excess in travel and trade and romance. My marriage came of an End. My husband’s death came of a Storm. As I peered out the window, I dreaded what might come of this one.

  Someone spoke. “I can’t believe they’re sending us to this inbred hamlet.”

  The train shook as it traveled down the tracks, chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk, like the beating of an iron heart. I let it beat a while longer before I looked for the speaker.

  The car’s only other occupant was a balding priest.

  “I was born there,” I told him.

  Others might have been chastised. This priest only groaned. “Good God! And you have to go back. What a dreadful business.” He leaned in his seat. “Miserable place, the stormlands. Though I heard it’s not really the storm that’s the trouble, but the women.”

  I gave him a look.

  He grinned knowingly. “Not ones like yourself. The shades. Likho, Poludnica. Jealous, white-gowned Vila. Born of the storm, doomed to pull men down to it.”

  “Creatures to put fear in your heart,” I told him, having killed their kind before.

  He produced a flask. “I have just the cure for fear.”

  I took it and drank. I scarcely felt the burning.

  The priest looked me over. “I’ve read about Blue Widows in the paper. You couldn’t make up stories like that—no one would believe them if they weren’t real.” He leaned in, too interested. “Does the sword speak to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  But if it does, the Mother warned me once, Then you’ll know it’s time to give it up.

  A particular mesa grew steadily larger in the window, looming over buttes and a line of windswept pines. Little lights and homes dotted its flattened peak. There was home: There was Elik.

  The Storm was no more than a week away. Perhaps the Mother hoped I’d get stranded in it.

  That was the thought I had in mind when the first of the strangeness happened.

  The lights atop the mesa caught my eye. I figured them candles inside of houses, torches alighting fields. And yet they rose. They rose like sparks from a fire, glittering golden yellow in the sky above country dark. And then I saw a butterfly.

  It was much like any butterfly. Yet I saw it clearly in the night. Gold was its color, aglow like a lantern, and I swear by the stars that I heard it speak.

  Don’t come home.

  I noticed I was gripping my sword most tightly. For a time I only stared, flask in hand.

  Then I asked the priest: “Do you see that?”

  He blinked, as though awakening from a stupor. “See what?”

  I pointed. But there was nothing there.

  “Never mind,” I said. There was no point worrying him.

  The priest shrugged and took back his flask. We were quiet for a while.

  “You know,” he finally said. “That’s a very fine dress.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Bespoke, I’d wager. City work.”

  “That’s right.”

  He leaned in, conspiratorial. “Is it a Zaleski?”

  I stared at him until he moved to a different chair.

  #

  “We sent for a monster hunter. Not an old lady.”

  A woman does not discuss her age, but rest assured that I am not an old lady. There was no point telling the militiaman so; that would only be accepting the premise as meriting a response.

  The station lay in the very shadow of the mesa, cut halfway into rock. Steps spiraled up the mesa’s entire exterior, their edges rounded by the wind and rain of years. Two guards’ crossed spears barred the way. Men I recognized, older now. They did not recognize me. The priest, of course, they let up without a second glance.

  I laid my hand upon the pommel of my particular sword. “Do you know what this is?”

  He looked at me like I was daft. “Letter opener?”

  “It’s a King’s Blade.”

  “Horseshit. You’re trying to trick us into giving you shelter when the Storm hits. Well, we’ve got our food squared, and we don’t need another mouth.”

  The other fellow looked more nervous. There I sensed my advantage. “My name is Teresa Kowalczyk. I come in the name of God with a weapon of God. Any who would keep me from Elik are an enemy of God.”

  The two sotted fools who passed for a local militia were not immune to invocations of religion. They moved.

  My feet made dull clacks on the stone stairs. Everything was of stone, here. The thrusting cliffs, the leaning buildings, the walls, the wells; everything was dark, everything grey. Folk tilled terraced fields, beating hoes into unyielding earth. The adjoining buttes were shorter than the mesa, narrower; fields had been worked into their tops and rope bridges connected them all to one another.

  It was a very long drop. I possessed a native’s appreciation for the danger of a sudden breeze.

  “You are late,” said a bearded man I did not recognize.

  I held a hand to my hat, to keep the brim from whipping. “I took a bloody train,” I told him, ascending the final steps. “Do you suppose I could have flown?”

  That was a mistake. He hadn’t been angry with me before, but now he had a reason. “A man died last night. Died while you were sipping vodka in a cabin.” He added, “We wanted a knight.”

  I produced my letter of marque. “You got a Widow.”

  A monocle enlarged his eye while he studied the contract. I doubted he even knew how to tell
a fake.

  I had ideas about how my homecoming would play out, all of them by now inaccurate. Aside from a few farmers, I saw not a soul in town. All the windows were shuttered. The doors were painted with the moon-and-star, to ward off evil.

  “Seems a little sleepy for noon,” I said.

  That set him off more. “Sleepy,” he all but cursed. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Where’s the mayor?”

  “I’m the mayor. As of last week.”

  I looked at the man, then. Really looked at him. “Lazarevic?”

  “Welcome back, Teresa.”

  “You’ve aged.”

  “A not-unusual side effect of seven years passing,” said Lazarevic, scratching at that voluminous beard. When I left he could scarcely grow one; he’d hoped to marry some woman from the mountain to the east. Had he? “If you read the letters your parents sent you—“

  “Show me where he died. Bring anyone who saw anything.”

  “There may be a slight difficulty,” said Lazarevic. “They’re all asleep.”

  “I’ll be happy to wake them.”

  “I’ll be happy if you can.”

  Normal practice was to get to know the people first, see who could be trusted. I had an advantage in that I already knew the locals—and held a corresponding desire to see as few of them as possible.

  I didn’t get my wish. The town slowly came alive. Some came out to meet the priest, since Elik had no priest of its own and was surely in need of one to witness marriages. But I was the greater spectacle. Folk slowly opened their doors to peer at the woman returned from the capital, to murmur disapproval, not for the dress or the sword but for the memory of scandal. Few dared come outside. Was the monster so bad as that?

  Lazarevic led me to one of the buttes, across a rope bridge. Somehow it seemed sturdier when I was a child. On the other side was a two-story building, inelegant and wide. It passed locally for an inn.