Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  “Well done, boy,” Lord Iron said, dropping something heavy into Olaf’s lap. “I’ll have you taken home in my personal carriage. I have Lord Eichan’s sister to console this evening, and I won’t be needing horses to do it. And I thought you should know: it wasn’t unanimous. If His Majesty hadn’t taken your side, I think we might not have won the day.”

  “His Majesty?”

  Olaf’s mind reeled. The face of the eldest judge resolved itself suddenly into the portrait he kept at his desk.

  “You did well, boy,” Lord Iron said. “Your country thanks you.”

  Without another word, Lord Iron unlocked the door, stepped out to the corridor, and was gone. Olaf looked down. A packet of bills squatted in his lap. Five hundred pounds at a guess, and blood smeared on the topmost bill.

  He swore to himself in that moment that he would never answer another summons from Lord Iron, whatever the consequences. And, indeed, when the hour arrived, it was Lord Iron who came to him.

  The weeks and months that followed were if anything richer in their tales of Lord Iron. While traveling in the Orient, he had forced a barkeep who had fallen into debt to choose between cutting off one of his infant daughter’s toes or three of his own fingers in lieu of payment. He had seduced six nuns in Rome, leaving two of them with child. He had ridden an ostrich down the streets of Cairo naked at midnight. Of the untimely death of Lord Eichan there was no word, but apart from removing the portrait of the king from his desk, Olaf took no action. The less he personally figured into the debaucheries of Lord Iron, the better pleased he was.

  Instead, Olaf plunged more deeply than ever into his work, his routine, and the harmless escapism of his men’s adventure novels. But for the first time in memory, the perils of the heroines seemed contrived and weak; the masculine bravery of the heroes seemed overstated, like a boy who blusters and puffs out his chest when walking through the graveyard at dusk.

  Clifford Knightly wrestled an alligator on the banks of the great Nile. Lord Morrow foiled the evil Chaplain Grut’s plan to foul the waters of London. Emily Chastain fell gratefully into the mighty arms of the noble savage Maker-of-Justice. And Olaf found himself wondering what these great men would have done at Club Baphomet. Wrested the gun from Lord Iron? From Simon, Lord Eichan? Sternly spoken of God and truth and righteousness? Olaf doubted it would have had any great effect.

  Winter passed into spring. Spring ripened to summer. Slowly, Olaf’s discontent, like the nightmares from which he woke himself shouting, lessened. For weeks on end, he could forget what he had been part of. Many men who came to his window at the postal authority had traveled widely. Many had tales to tell of near misses: a runaway carriage that had come within a pace of running them down in the streets of Prague, a fever which had threatened to carry them away in Bombay, the hiss of an Afghan musket ball passing close to their head. Olaf had tales of his own now, if he ever chose to share them. That was all.

  And still, when autumn with its golden leaves and fog and chill rain also brought Lord Iron back into his life, Olaf was not surprised.

  It was a Tuesday night in September. Olaf had spent his customary hours at the Magdalen Gate postal authority, come back to his boarding house, and eaten alone in his room. The evening air was cool but not biting, and he had propped his window open before sitting down to read. When he woke, he thought for a long, bleary moment that the cold night breeze had woken him. Then the knock at his door repeated itself.

  His blanket wrapped around his shoulder, Olaf answered the door. Lord Iron stood in the hall. He looked powerfully out of place. His fine jacket and cravat, the polished boots, the well-groomed beard and moustache all belonged in a palace or club. And yet, rather than making the boarding house hall seem shabby and below him, the hallway made Lord Iron, monster of the city, seem false as a boy playing dress-up. Olaf nodded as if he’d been expecting the man.

  “I have need of you,” Lord Iron said.

  “Have I the option of refusal?”

  Lord Iron smiled, and Olaf took it as the answer to his question. He stepped back and let the man come through. Lord Iron sat on the edge of the bed while Olaf closed his window, drew up his chair, and sat. In the light from Olaf’s reading lamp, Lord Iron’s skin seemed waxen and pale. His voice, when he spoke, was distant as a man shouting from across a square.

  “There is a question plaguing me,” Lord Iron said. “You are the only man I can think of who might answer it.”

  “Is there a life at stake?” Olaf asked.

  “No,” Lord Iron said. “Nothing so petty as that.”

  When Olaf failed to respond, Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, looked up at him. There was a terrible weariness in his eyes.

  “I would know the fair price for a man’s soul,” he said.

  “Forgive me?” Olaf said.

  “You heard me,” Lord Iron said. “What would be a fit trade for a soul? I … I can’t tell any longer. And it is a question whose answer has … some relevance to my situation.”

  In an instant, Olaf’s mind conjured the sitting room at the Club Baphomet. Lord Iron sitting in one deep leather chair, and the Prince of Lies across from him with a snifter of brandy in his black, clawed hands.

  “I don’t think that would be a wise course to follow,” Olaf said, though in truth his mind was spinning out ways to avoid being party to this diabolism. He did not wish to make a case before that infernal judge. Lord Iron smiled and shook his head.

  “There is no one in this besides yourself and me,” he said. “You are an expert in the exchange of exotic currencies. I can think of none more curious than this. Come to my house on Mammon Street in a month’s time. Tell me what conclusion you have reached.”

  “My Lord—”

  “I will make good on the investment of your time,” Lord Iron said, then rose and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

  Olaf gaped at the empty room. He was a cambist. Of theology, he knew only what he had heard in church. He had read more of satanic contracts in his adventure novels than in the Bible. He was, in fact, not wholly certain that the Bible had an example of a completed exchange. Satan had tempted Jesus. Perhaps there was something to be taken from the Gospel of Matthew …

  Olaf spent the remainder of the night poring over his Bible and considering what monetary value might be assigned to the ability to change stones to bread. But as the dawn broke and he turned to his morning ablutions, he found himself unsatisfied. The devil might have tempted Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, but it was obvious that such an offer wouldn’t be open to everyone. He was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

  As he rode through the deep tunnels to Magdalen Gate, as he stopped at the newsstand for a morning paper, as he checked the ticker tape and updated his slate, his mind occupied itself by sifting through all the stories and folk wisdom he had ever heard. There had been a man who traded his soul to the devil for fame and wealth. Faust had done it for knowledge. Was there a way to represent the learning of Faust in terms of, say, semesters at the best universities of Europe? Then the rates of tuition might serve as a fingerhold.

  It was nearly the day’s end before the question occurred to him that put Lord Iron’s commission in its proper light, and once that had happened, the answer was obvious. Olaf had to sit down, his mind afire with the answer and its implications. He didn’t go home, but took himself to a small public house. Over a pint and a stale sandwich, he mentally tested his hypothesis. With the second pint, he celebrated. With the third, he steeled himself, then went out to the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the house of Lord Iron.

  Revelers had infected the household like fleas on a dying rat. Masked men and women shrieked with laughter, not all of which bespoke mirth. No servant came to take his coat or ask his invitation, so Olaf made his own way through the great halls. He passed through the whole of the building before emerging from the back and finding Lord Iron himself sitting at a fountain in the gardens. His lordshi
p’s eyebrows rose to see Olaf, but he did not seem displeased.

  “So soon, boy? It isn’t a month,” Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron’s face from below and above at once.

  “There was no need,” Olaf said. “I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?”

  Lord Iron opened his hand in motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

  “Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of wellbeing. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated.”

  “I believe I can follow you so far,” Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment.”

  “Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.”

  Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

  “You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.”

  “He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

  “And so I saw,” Olaf said. “You aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

  Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his errors into the scale of legend.

  “You are correct, boy,” he said. “The angels wouldn’t have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have … treated it poorly. It’s left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse.”

  “I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: The price of a soul is a life of humility and service.”

  “Ah, is that all,” Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

  “And as it happens,” Olaf went on, “I have one such with which I would be willing to part.”

  Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

  “Here,” Olaf said, “is what I propose …”

  Edmund, the new cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority was, by all accounts, an adequate replacement for Olaf. Not as good, certainly. But his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face leant him an eagerness that belonged on a younger man, and if he seemed sometimes more haughty than his position justified, it was a vice that lessened with every passing month. By Easter, he had even been asked to join in the Sunday picnic the girls in the accounting office sponsored. He seemed genuinely moved at the invitation.

  The great scandal of the season was the disappearance of Lord Iron. The great beast of the city simply vanished one night. Rumor said that he had left his fortune and lands in trust. The identity of the trustee was a subject of tremendous speculation.

  Olaf himself spent several months simply taking stock of his newfound position in the world. Once the financial situation was put in better order, he found himself with a substantial yearly allowance that still responsibly protected the initial capital.

  He spent his monies traveling to India, Egypt, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the unworldly underground cities of Persia. He saw the sun set off the Gold Coast and rise from the waters east of Japan. He heard war songs in the jungles of the Congo and sang children’s lullabies in a lonely tent made from yak skin in the dark of a Siberian winter.

  And, when he paused to recover from the rigors and dangers of travel, he would retire to a cottage north of the city—the least of his holdings—and spend his time writing men’s adventure novels set in the places he had been.

  He named his protagonist Lord Iron.

  © 2007 by Daniel Abraham.

  Originally published in Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, edited by John Klima.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com) has published sixteen novels and almost three dozen short stories. He is also adapting George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones into graphic novels. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, and has won the International Horror Guild award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James SA Corey. He lives in New Mexico.

  With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came

  A.C. Wise

  She woke with the words I love you on her tongue, speaking them aloud to an empty room.

  They tasted of smoke and ash drifting over a far-distant, muddy field. The War that had taken her lover had lost him. She knew he was dead, because she’d never spoken the words aloud before.

  He’d whispered them in her ear countless times—lying side-by-side in the furrows of their sheets, offered on summer days, spoken in the midst of roof-drumming rainstorms keeping her from her dreams. She’d smiled in return, meaning to answer every time. But she found her teeth locked, her lips stitched closed. He would squeeze her hand, echo her smile with sad patience, and say, Some day. When you’re ready.

  Ten years passed in a single, conjoined heartbeat. Then news came from beyond the Mountain. The papers were full of men and women dying in rain-battered fields. Her lover read them, and every day carved deeper lines around his mouth, and between his eyes.

  Over breakfasts of buttered toast, his untouched, he read to her of mud-spattered corpses, of bright poppies trampled beneath heavy-soled boots, and children crushed the same way, until their skin no longer hid their bones. He read of mass graves, of torture, and atrocities, and leaving grew in his eyes. When she wanted to ask him to stay, fear once more stitched her lips closed.

  She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. But hands pressed to his skin, and stubborn lips and teeth refusing to shape words, could only hold him so long. His love was vast; it encompassed strangers, dying in fields he’d never seen. He went to War. Her love was small, and encompassed only him. She stayed behind.

  I love you.

  Now she could say the words until her throat bled with them; he would never hear.

  Moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating soft-rumpled sheets. She wrapped arms around her body, surveying furniture and knick-knacks that would never mean as much, absent of his hands. She retraced his footsteps; she fit the whorls of her fingertips into the ghost of his touch.

  There was nothing to hold her here anymore. No hands pressed to her skin, no words waited to be spoken.

  She packed, and left at dawn. The absence of words had lost him, but there was a place she’d heard of in tales where she could drown herself in them. Abandoning the house by the sea, she set out for the Library on the Mountain.

  The Librarians shaved her head. They called her Acolyte. They gave her a new name, Alba, which they told her meant dawn. And they assigned her the duty of dusting and caring for the books in the Main Hall.

  She never saw the Librarians, only their shapes, buried in deep-hooded robes the color of the sky just before sunrise. They wrote words on slips of paper, and dropped them into her hands. Their instructions given, the Librarians hid their fingers in their voluminous sleeves again, and turned away.

  “Wait!” Alba called after them.

  The word echoed, vast and terrible, shocking the Li
brary’s silence. She put a hand over her mouth, expecting a hood to drop, baleful eyes to fix her, and a hand to point her back the way she’d come. Instead, a single finger emerged, brief, thin, and pressed to invisible lips inside a hood.

  “Shh.”

  Footsteps made arcane patterns in the dust. The Librarians withdrew, leaving her alone.

  Alba memorized the Librarians’ slips of paper—directions to the Main Hall, to a small cell she could call her own, to the Refectory where Acolytes and Novices took their meals. There were other scraps, telling her where she could and could not go. Acolytes were not allowed beyond the Main Hall, the Primary Stacks, and the First Archives. The Reading Rooms, the Second Archives, the Restricted Section, and the Vaults, were for Novices, Apprentices, and Librarians alone.

  “Why?” Alba asked her neighbor at one meal.

  The dour man, his skin the color of his porridge, glared at her with sunken eyes. He snatched his bowl, and scuttled away, as though Alba’s single word bore the seeds of a plague to infect the Library’s stillness and bring it crashing down. After that meal, Alba never saw him again.

  Alba tried to be content with what she was allowed; after all, it wasn’t without wonder. The Main Hall was vast, filled with floor to ceiling shelves, wooden leviathans lit by tall, narrow windows. They held volumes, packed tight, their spines of every color and texture—cloth-bound, leather-bound, and clapped between boards of thin wood tied with rough twine.

  Alba dusted, striving to lose herself in repetitive motion, telling herself it was everything she could desire. Still, when she paused to wipe sweat from her brow, she would remember the particular scent of her lover, like sharp spice and incense. She would feel his shirt—heat-damp from a day in the garden—as he put his arms around her. When she ran a hand over the stubble of her hair, she would remember the back of his neck, fresh from a haircut. Once, when she bit her tongue, she remembered the way his would flick out between his teeth at the beginning of a laugh.