by Baen Books
“Not for you,” father said. “This instead.”
He put tea in my hands. He must have brewed it a while ago. It was still warm and I was glad to have it.
“Look, this is all very touching,” said Lazarevic. “But what is it? Did you kill it, or not?”
I asked, “Where’s Agata?”
My father stared at me. Mother inhaled sharply.
“Teresa,” father said quietly, “You never read the letters, did you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Agata died six years ago.”
For a time I only heard the clock.
“It happened the winter after you left.”
But I’d just seen her, part of me wanted to say. What a tasteless joke, another part wished to believe. But in the twilit places between City society and the wild country, the truth was often bitter.
“She’s the monster,” I told myself, as much as them.
They all thought I’d killed my husband. Now I knew I’d have to kill my sister.
“I’ll not hear it spoken,” said Father, stern as on church-day.
“And I won’t say it again. But the truth won’t change.” I looked at Lazarevic. “Help me up.”
“You’re in no state,” he told me, helping all the same. Enough to sit, at least. “And you don’t have your sword.”
“It’s down there, somewhere.” Not that it’d do me any good. Finding it could take a week or more, and the Storm would come sooner than that.
Lazarevic tried to stop me when I stood. “You can’t kill a monster without proper tools,” he said. “Anybody knows that. We’ve not got any.”
“She’ll be weaker in the day,” I said, looking through shelves for a hat. “And a Vila has weaknesses.” I found a battered and sweat-stained tricorn, a hundred years unfashionable. I shoved it on my head and already felt halfway recovered.
“She could be anywhere,” said Lazarevic. “You’ll never find her.”
I buttoned my coat in silence. I allowed my mother to help with the trickiest button. Then I turned up the tricorn’s brim and rotated it to a rakish angle. “I know exactly where she’ll be.”
#
Worse than a nightmare is the hallucination born of fever. I touched my brow, but it was cold. This hallucination, I wagered, was Agata’s doing. Or at least, the creature who held that name in life.
In front of me, on the steps to the town’s highest peak, I saw myself. Young, unscarred. Arm-in-arm with Serafin.
“If anyone finds out,” my image told him, grinning with the energy of youth, “We’ll be in the worst kind of trouble.”
I watched him sweep me off my feet, one arm around my back, one beneath my knees. I laughed with the thrill of danger, the potential of a drop, even as I trusted in his strength. How did a clerk keep so fit, anyhow?
“I don’t care,” Serafin said. “They’re going to find out eventually, anyway. I’m not going to marry Agata.”
“You’ll have to break the betrothal,” I told him, finger at his chin.
“It’ll be a mess,” he agreed, uncaring. It was not our first tryst.
It all made me ill. I stepped through the image. It dissolved. Step by step I rose higher, until at last I attained the peak. The butte towered over all the others, too narrow for homes or fields. I braced against wind and trudged ahead.
There slept Agata, half-human in her aspect, yet still with dress and hair of white. Around her glittered golden shades. Six in all, one each for the villagers caught in unnatural slumber. When I looked at them, more delusions shimmered.
A farmer, traveling down a stormless road, in company of his friends. A spinster, remembering the passions of her youth. A militiaman, imagining past adventures, embellished beyond all reason. And somewhere, in the depths of those dreams, there was Agata. A passing happenstance, a chance meeting, or even as friend and lover. I am not sure how long I gazed. The images were half real, half in the mind. All moved with the irregular time of dreams.
Agata slept upon the grass. It grew unnaturally tall around her, as if spurred on by magic. All I needed, I consoled myself, was a single hair. And there were so many. Closer, I crept. I became aware of the creaking of my bones, the faint nose made by leather.
She did not wake. Delicately, I kneeled behind her. With my teeth, I removed my glove. I reached for the hair, plucked for a single strand.
Nails dug bloody furrows in my wrist. “I told you,” whispered Agata, “To go home.” Green eyes opened.
One after another, the shades winked out, faces twisted in alarm.
“You’re killing them,” I told her. “Slowly, but all the same.”
Agata stood, then. No—floated. “Yes, there have been accidents,” she admitted. “Dream-weaving isn’t easy. But they’re all miserable. Everyone is miserable, Teresa.” She twisted a perfect mouth, face more beautiful than I remembered. “Lives of dirt and dust and nothing. When they sleep, I give them dreams. Dreams of wonder. Dreams of love. They love me. I love them.”
“I loved you, too.”
Agata’s face stretched. Her lips curled unnaturally wide, a ghoulish sneer. Her skin split along the edges of her mouth. Cracks and furrows marred her face like brittle porcelain, the skull as white beneath. “Then why did you come here?” She howled with the gale of a Storm. I struggled not to tumble.
“I left my sword behind,” I told her, heart thudding. “I didn’t know it was you, before.”
Agata’s eyes softened. Translucent mist filled the graven hollows in her face. “You killed him, Teresa.”
I could not argue. Agata had emptied the air from my lungs.
“You killed him. You killed me.” About her hands glittered golden dust. Dust like that of the butterflies. “Remember it.” She blew, and the dust took my eyes.
#
“You said it was the only day like it in a hundred years. The only day anyone could see the comet.”
“That’s right,” said Serafin, bleary-eyed. “But if I don’t finish this copy by tomorrow, I’ll have nothing to sell at market, which means another hard Storm season.”
“There’ll be other market days. Other market years. This is your only chance to see a . . . what did you call it?”
“A star unmoored,” he muttered, self-conscious about his poetry. He fussed over his quill.
“Well, you’re not the only one who sells things at market.” Goodness knows it had been effort hiding my piecework from him. I laid the product of that labor on the table. Its brass body made a solid, satisfying clunk.
“Is that . . . ?”
I unwrapped a cloth from around the telescope. “We’re using it tonight. You do not get to disagree.”
He wore a crooked, white-toothed grin. “Maybe I could take a break for a couple hours.”
But the Storm was unkind. By nightfall, the wind howled enough to shake every rope and mooring. One of the militiamen, just sober enough to intervene, barred the path to the highest peak.
“Sorry,” said he. “It’s too dangerous. Wind’s up too high. Couldn’t conscience it in safety.”
“We can try from down here,” suggested Serafin. He didn’t look optimistic—there was far too much fog. We couldn’t see fifteen feet ahead, much less the stars.
“Nonsense,” I told him. “I’ve got an idea.”
The piecework, of course, was herbal. If Molovia has one thing in excess, it is herbs. Things grow beneath the cover of the Storm that thrive nowhere else. I knew which to grind and which to brew to make an especially potent emetic. I knew how to add it to a drink to hide the flavor. And I knew a certain militiaman who would not turn down a drink.
So while he spent the night divesting himself, I grasped Serafin by the hand, and let him up that accursed peak. When the wind struck us, I laughed, full of the invincibility of youth.
Cross-winds came. Earth slid like gravel. Serafin tumbled, the telescope with him, and I could but crouch and watch, lest I die the same.
Come Storm’s
End we found him broken and bloated, gnawed upon by beasts.
The story came out, of course. Weeping, I admitted to the crime of poisoning, if not to culpability in death. They certainly could not prove me responsible, said the militiaman, but then, the only witness had conveniently tumbled off a cliff. Who knew what lurked in the heart of woman.
You bring misery to everyone you love, my father told me.
I didn’t push him, I swore, and they believed me.
But you’re still the one that killed him, said my mother. I thought my infidelity absolved by marriage. Apparently I’d been the only one so fooled. This is God’s punishment, make no mistake.
I left to join the clergy, blaming everyone but myself.
Agata tried to follow, but knew not the way I traveled. Down the high road she wandered, until the Storm forced her home. There she dwelled in melancholy, deeper by the day. None dared draw her close, lest they be tainted by association.
One day she slipped from a precipice. No one knew how intentional the death, but everyone had their own idea. Really, said the mayor, it was inevitable.
#
Agata looked upon me contemptuously, toes not quite touching ground. “Now he would see me. Now he wouldn’t dwell on you. I’m as beautiful as I always deserved to be.”
Light passed through her beautiful face, translucent, to reveal bone and socket.
“It’s a striking look,” I told her.
She wrenched me up by my hair. “Oh, isn’t that just like you, Teresa. Always the jest, to hide what you really think. So tell me! Tell me what you really think.”
“You were right,” I told her.
She hadn’t expected that. The color slowly returned to her face, to her hair. She looked again like Agata, the woman. Agata my sister.
“I seduced your fiancé,” I confessed, believing it. How long had I resisted the desire? I’d relished surrendering to it. “I stole your marriage. I pushed Serafin into danger. I never spared you a thought.”
Agata grasped my shoulders. “As long as you understand. You have to understand, Teresa.” She put her arms around me and hugged. My stomach fluttered, as I put a hand to the back of her head, to hold it against my shoulder. Her touch was cold, like marble. “This is . . . who I am, now. What I am. I can’t change it.”
“Which is why,” I said, fingers coiling at the nape of her neck, “I have to take responsibility.”
My fingers wrenched. Hair came free.
Agata shrieked like the siren. She fell backwards, all at once transformed into the thing with eyes of green. I saw it on her face: The hurt. The betrayal.
My ears rang. When I spoke, I could not hear my own voice. “Hear me!”
She lay seized in stillness, bone-white.
“Go, now,” I told her. “Leave here. And do not come back!”
Nothing happened, for a moment.
And then all that remained of her was a vanishing breeze.
I fell to my knees. For a while, that was all. But soon I remembered my duty. I remembered the hunt. No marque was complete until the monster was well and truly slain.
There was brush enough to make a campfire. I’d learned how ages ago; the Mother had shown me, before her promotion. There was comfort in the ritual, the friction of sticks and branch. Just enough to take my mind off what I must do.
I held a single wisp of hair above the flame. White strands drifted in the fire’s rising heat, as I bent down to stir the embers. Fire warmed my hands.
It wasn’t her, I told myself. It was a beast, born of her passing.
I tried to believe it.
#
Come the morning I sat on the edge of the precipice, boots dangling in open air. Storm-clouds roiled in the distance. Townsfolk had come, words were spoken, marque papers stamped to satisfaction. There would be more marques waiting in the city. There was always more monstrosity born from the hearts of men.
“The train leaves in ten minutes,” said the priest, behind me.
“I can’t go back yet,” I said. “Have to find the sword.” I hadn’t bothered looking.
The priest set down the Blade, somehow reunited with its scabbard. “Your father found it by a grave. Someone your mother recognized.”
He waited a moment, hoping I might say something.
Eventually he left.
On my smallest finger lay a knot, tied from strands of hair. I watched it stir, while the Storm drew closer.
Sufficient Unto the Day
Tim Powers
Everybody agreed that Nana Coldharp, well up in her eighties now, was at last clearly too old to manage the family Thanksgiving get-together anymore, so this year her late-in-life daughter Hibiscus, known as Biscuit, was to be in charge. Biscuit was the youngest of the Coldharps by more than twenty years, and there weren’t likely to be any more of them, since her brother David still hadn’t married—and, considering that he was now fifty and seldom left the house, he didn’t seem likely to. Everybody called him Shortstack. The family, living and dead, was mostly Hoffmans now, since Biscuit’s older sister Judith had married Hanky Hoffman in 1982. He had died fifteen years ago, but Biscuit still hadn’t warmed to him.
At 4 PM on Thanksgiving afternoon she had put on an apron and tied her chestnut hair back in a ponytail and was preparing the accommodation water for certain of the expected guests. Under the sink was a board that swung up, and from the recess underneath she carefully lifted out the original bottle and unlooped the ribbon that held the glass stopper in place.
She poured half of it into a saucepan, restoppered the bottle and set it back where she’d got it, then filled the saucepan with water from the tap. It would warm gradually on an unlit burner as the turkey was finishing up in the oven.
While it worked at changing the ordinary water, she crossed the stone tile floor and looked out the window and down the long dirt driveway, streaked now with the shadows of a descending line of bearded palm trees. No guests yet, though six crystal prisms were hung on strings at the dining room’s western window.
The house was a big old three-story neo-Victorian at the top of a hill in Moscone, an unincorporated little town only an hour east of Los Angeles by mapbooks but much farther away in demeanor. Grandpa Coldharp had built the house in the 1920s, and two generations of Coldharps had labored to keep the place from collapsing in the years since.
The kitchen was warm, and smelled of the roasting turkey and the bacon strips she’d laid over it for basting, and Biscuit walked out into the cooler living room and stood by the fireplace, where a couple of logs had been laid ready on the grate. The one-drop rhythm of reggae music was faintly audible from Shortstack’s room down the hall, and she could hear Nana thumping around upstairs.
Through the screen door at the far end of the room now came the whirring rattle of a Volkswagen laboring up the driveway in too high a gear. That would be Amelia and her two kids, Jasper and Jackalyn. Biscuit sighed and lifted from the mantel the glass box with Grandpa Coldharp’s oracular penny in it. It was an Indian head penny, minted in 1909, and when the box was shaken the penny bounced around inside but always came up heads; the family tradition was that you could ask it any question, as long as the answer was yes.
“Will this dinner turn out the way it should?” she asked in a whisper.
She shook the box, and when the penny stopped rattling around, it had come up heads for yes.
Biscuit put the box back on the mantel and returned to the kitchen. A couple of big pasta pots, already nearly filled with tap water, had been set on the Formica counter, and now she lifted the saucepan from the stove and carefully poured the contents into the pasta pots. The saucepan was completely dry afterward, and she clanked it away into a cupboard beside the sink.
From the living room came the bang of the screen door and fast thumping on the carpet, and then ten-year-old Jasper was in the kitchen, pulling open the stove door and reaching in to break off a piece of the crisp bacon on the turkey.
Biscuit grabb
ed the back of the boy’s T-shirt and yanked him away. “You go wait in the living room,” she told him.
He shook his head. “I’m liable to upset Jackalyn.” Jackalyn was thirteen, and things tended to break and fly around when she became agitated. “She’s already in a bad temper because of her parakeet—Mom’s hair got all tied up in knots on the drive here.” He looked around the kitchen. “Does Uncle Shortstack still have his gun?”
“None of your business.” Biscuit closed the oven door. “And don’t upset me, either.” She was sixteen years older than Jasper, but was often intimidated by him.
The boy dragged a stool to the counter and stood on it, and a moment later he had fetched a coffee cup down from a cupboard and dipped it into one of the pots of accommodation water.
“Pea brain!” exclaimed Biscuit, slapping his hand so that he let go of the cup. “You don’t drink that! You want to look like your grandfather’s radiator that time?” Jasper just stared at her blankly, for in fact he hadn’t even been born yet when Hanky Hoffman had blown a radiator hose in the driveway one Christmas morning and all the water had come gushing out of the bottom of the car.
“Never mind,” Biscuit went on, “look, it’s not ordinary water.” She reached into the pot and fished out the coffee cup, and when she raised her arm out of the water her hand was dry and the cuff of her shirt was loose and undarkened. “And the cup’s dry too.”
Jasper’s eyes were wide, and he immediately tore a paper towel off a roll on the counter and dipped the sheet into the liquid; and when he lifted it out, it was still bright and dry.
“That’s what goes in the fishbowls?” he said.
“They’re not fishbowls tonight, and get out of here. If you’ve got to upset your sister, see that you don’t do it in the dining room.” We don’t need the Haviland china plates broken, she thought.
As he slouched out of the kitchen, she stirred the accommodation water with one finger; it was like stirring very fine fluffy sand, and her finger was dry and uncooling when she pulled her hand back. At least we know the seed water worked, she thought. And now we’ll once again have a fresh batch to top up the original bottle with.
