“Trained her for what, exactly?”
The second the question leaves her mouths, Agnes knows she has made a mistake. It’s not the question itself, but it’s the feeling behind it. What was it all for? The girls’ school, the classes, the years of learning how to read secret codes and to kill and blow things up?
The manticore sidesteps the question. “She’d been reliable for years, the last person I would have thought to turn traitor. I had hopes for her. But you can’t blame that on me entirely. She worked under your watch for the last two years, and you didn’t see it coming?”
“I might have had suspicions if I’d been paying more careful attention,” she admits. This is a truth. She watched the enemy, but she took her eyes off the most important thing to monitor: herself. She let herself doubt her mission and her purpose. And she let herself get invested in Blackland.
Why does any of this matter? Agnes didn’t have Sebastian transform her into the wolf to talk. She had him do it so she could get close to the manticore and have some protection once she did. Both objectives, reached.
But she still wants the manticore to give her a good reason why Sebastian Blackland should be harvested. She wants to hear how his murder can serve some greater good. And if the manticore gives her that? What a loathsome creature Agnes must be that she’s still not absolutely certain what she’ll do.
The manticore looks to the ceiling, a gesture Agnes recognizes. She’s calculating.
“I don’t like dickering, so I’m going to make you a preemptive offer,” the manticore says. “I’ll increase the sphinx oil to twelve gallons. That’s double what we agreed on.”
She looks at Agnes expectantly. Agnes doesn’t know what she should say, so she says nothing.
The manticore is exasperated now, on the verge of anger. “I’ll add two hundred grams of steppe hippogriff, plus the formula for weaponizing it. That’s magic you’ve never seen in the South. Your buyers will make you rich for that.”
Wait, Agnes thinks. Buyers? Is that what this is all about?
“And in return?” she prods.
“Sebastian Blackland’s body. All of it. Every last organ and bone.”
“And then you get rich.”
The manticore smiles, and somehow she manages to make her glorious lion face look tawdry.
Agnes gets it now. The manticore and the wolf have been trading magic. Southern magic in the North commands top dollar on the black market. And likewise Northern magic in the South.
Agnes’s work in the Southern Kingdom has never been about protecting the North. It’s not about preventing another San Francisco fire. It has zero to do with Fresno. She’s been nothing but a procurer of Southern magic. Her reports from the Tar Pits were inventories. And when Sebastian came to her for help, he became an unwitting supplier. Agnes is only a mule.
“So, now you know, Agnes.”
Agnes’s heart hammers. The manticore looks at her with maternal affection.
“Didn’t fool you at all?” Agnes says. Her voices feel thin as paper.
“Your shape-shifting is very good craft. Blackland’s talented. But I’m very old, love, and I’m not just manticore. I’ve eaten a lot of magic.” She draws her tail barb down the window, a knife scraping glass. “What do you want to do, Agnes?”
“What are my options?”
“You could give me Blackland.”
Agnes absolutely could do that. She could give the manticore Blackland, and she could take the North’s sphinx oil and steppe hippogriff, and, with the manticore’s help, maybe even remain the wolf, and survive and perhaps even profit.
“That is really your only option, Agnes.”
“Hm,” Agnes says.
The manticore’s eyes narrow. “Oh, Agnes, had you a hundred heads and a hundred sets of fearsome jaws, you would still not survive a fight with me.”
But Agnes doesn’t need that many jaws. She just needs one tooth, the one Sebastian prepared.
As a tooth, it’s not much, just a pebble of bone stuck in her empty gum socket with denture adhesive. But it’s the bone of a Sierra firedrake, and Sebastian spent hours cooking it at precise temperatures, smelling it to probe its osteomantic properties, lovingly teasing out its magic with flame.
A push of the tongue, and the tooth dislodges. She swallows it whole.
A breath.
By the time the stale air reaches her lungs, it’s blade-sharp and cold, the air of the high mountaintops on the eastern edge of California. She holds it and feels herself soaring down from the concealment of the clouds, her screaming cry shaking needles from the tall pines, sending griffins into panicked stampede.
The manticore’s eyes widen as she realizes what’s happening. Her tail snaps forward, the barb loaded with poison. But she’s too late. Agnes exhales, and the world becomes dragon flame.
Somewhere in that world, the manticore shrieks.
* * *
—
Later, Agnes finds a phone in the disco. She dials a number.
“Yes?” says Sebastian.
“It’s done,” says Agnes. “Come get your meal.”
* * *
—
“Maria, I’m home.”
Sebastian comes through the back door late with take-out ribs from Kelbo’s. He’s home late most nights, but he does come home. Their house is a comfortable but somewhat ramshackle construction tucked into a shady gully in Reseda. It’s less than what Sebastian can afford, but Agnes doesn’t want to live in a neighborhood with other osteomancers.
“Good job,” Agnes says with a kiss. The praise is for remembering to call her Maria. She chose the name Maria because she’s never had a close relationship with anyone named Maria. And she chose the last name Sigilo because it’s Spanish for “secret,” and it reminds her not to get too comfortable with her new identity, not even with the new face she sculpted with the help of chimera bone.
Daniel Blackland is only six months old, and it’s too soon to tell how much he’s going to look like Agnes or Sebastian. His skin is already dark like Agnes’s, and she hopes that’s as far as the resemblance will go. She doesn’t want to have to change his face. It seems a child should have the right to live with their own face, but Agnes will make Sebastian transform it into something else if that’s what it takes to protect their son. She accepts that as her responsibility. Sebastian loves the boy, but even with his promotions at the Ossuary, and the obvious power in his eyes from having eaten Cerberus wolf and manticore and the bones of so many other creatures, he doesn’t have Agnes’s ruthlessness. Los Angeles is a town that requires ruthlessness.
“Did you bring it?” Maria asks as Sebastian plates the ribs while she pours wine.
He digs into his pocket and pulls out a tar-brown thorn. It’s a piece of griffin claw.
Maria has come to understand that, if real magic is in doing what you want to do and denying others’ power over you, then the source of her magic is her ruthlessness. She will not bend to a Hierarch, a wizard-queen, a wolf, or a manticore.
She won’t see her son bend to them either.
She takes the griffin claw and puts it in the high cupboard above the refrigerator, in a cookie jar containing other bits and odds of bone. This is Daniel’s future. When he’s old enough, she’ll feed him as much bone as it takes to make sure no one will ever dare harm him.
Sebastian sets Daniel up in his highchair and spoon-feeds him pureed peas. Daniel doesn’t like them, but Sebastian coaxes and makes airplane sounds while trying to land the spoon.
“C’mon, kid,” Agnes says. “Eat up and get strong.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award–winner George R. R. Martin, New York Times bestselling author of the landmark A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, has been called “the American Tolkien.”
Born in
Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as one of the most popular SF writers of the seventies. He quickly became a mainstay of the Ben Bova Analog with stories such as “With Morning Comes Mistfall,” “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” “The Storms of Windhaven” (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), “Override,” and others, although he also sold to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets. One of his Analog stories, the striking novella “A Song for Lya,” won him his first Hugo Award, in 1974.
By the end of the seventies, he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer, and was producing his best work in that category with stories such as the famous “Sandkings,” his best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980 (he’d later win another Nebula in 1985 for his story “Portraits of His Children”), “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” which won a Hugo Award in the same year (making Martin the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year), “Bitterblooms,” “The Stone City,” “Starlady,” and others. These stories would be collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now, he had mostly moved away from Analog, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Havalend Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the eighties in the Stanley Schmidt Analog, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella “Nightflyers.” Most of his major work of the late seventies and early eighties, though, would appear in Omni. The late seventies and the eighties also saw the publication of his memorable novel Dying of the Light, his only solo SF novel, while his stories were collected in A Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and Portraits of His Children. By the beginning of the eighties, he’d moved away from SF and into the horror genre, publishing the big horror novel Fevre Dream, and winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story “The Pear-Shaped Man” and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella “The Skin Trade.” By the end of that decade, though, the crash of the horror market and the commercial failure of his ambitious horror novel Armageddon Rag had driven him out of the print world and to a successful career in television instead, where for more than a decade he worked as story editor or producer on such shows as the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.
After years away, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world in 1996 with the publication of the immensely successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, the start of his Song of Ice and Fire sequence. A free-standing novella taken from that work, “Blood of the Dragon,” won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Further books in the Song of Ice and Fire series—A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons—have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and bestselling series in all of modern fantasy. Recently, the books were made into an HBO TV series, Game of Thrones, which has become one of the most popular and acclaimed shows on television, and made Martin a recognizable figure well outside of the usual genre boundaries—even inspiring a satirical version of him on Saturday Night Live. Martin’s most recent books include a massive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career, GRRM: A RRetrospective, a novella collection, Starlady and Fast-Friend, a novel written in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham, Hunter’s Run, and, as editor, several anthologies edited in collaboration with Gardner Dozois, including Warriors, Song of the Dying Earth, Songs of Love and Death, Down These Strange Streets, Dangerous Women, and Rogues, as well as several new volumes in his long-running Wild Cards anthology series. In 2012, Martin was given the Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention. His most recent books are High Stakes, the twenty-third volume in the Wild Card series, and The World of Ice and Fire, an illustrated history of the Seven Kingdoms.
Although most famous for his tales of Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms, here he visits the world of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth instead, taking us to the Land of the Falling Wall, through a haunted forest and across a bleak, dismal tarn, for a dangerous and surprising night of hospitality at the Tarn House (famous for their hissing eels), in company with a strange and varied cast of colorful characters—none of whom are even remotely what they seem.
◆ ◆ ◆
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
Through the purple gloom came Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.
Above them hung a swollen sun where dark continents of black ash were daily spreading across dying seas of dim red fire. Behind and before the forest loomed, steeped in scarlet shadow. Seven feet tall and black as onyx, the Deodands wore ragged skirts and nothing else. The right front Deodand, fresher than the others, squished with every step. Gaseous and swollen, his ripening flesh oozed noxious fluid from a thousand pinpricks where the Excellent Prismatic Spray had pierced him through. His passage left damp spots upon the surface of the road—an ancient and much-overgrown track whose stones had been laid during the glory days of Thorsingol, now a fading memory in the minds of men.
The Deodands moved at a steady trot, eating up the leagues. Being dead, they did not feel the chill in the air, nor the cracked and broken stones beneath their heels. The palanquin swayed from side to side, a gentle motion that made Molloqos think back upon his mother rocking him in his cradle. Even he had had a mother once, but that was long ago. The time of mothers and children had passed. The human race was fading, whilst grues and erbs and pelgranes claimed the ruins they left behind.
To dwell on such matters would only invite a deeper melancholy, however. Molloqos preferred to consider the book upon his lap. After three days of fruitless attempts to commit the Excellent Prismatic Spray to memory once again, he had set aside his grimoire, a massive tome bound in cracked vermillion leather with clasps and hinges of black iron, in favor of a slender volume of erotic poetry from the last days of the Sherit Empire, whose songs of lust had gone to dust aeons ago. Of late his gloom ran so deep that even those fervid rhymes seldom stirred him to tumescence, but at least the words did not turn to worms wriggling on the vellum, as those in his grimoire seemed wont to do. The world’s long afternoon had given way to evening, and in that long dusk even magic had begun to crack and fade.
As the swollen sun sank slowly in the west, the words grew harder to discern. Closing his book, Molloqos pulled his Cloak of Fearful Mien across his legs, and watched the trees go past. With the dying of the light each seemed more sinister than the last, and he could almost see shapes moving in the underbrush, though when he turned his head for a better look they were gone.
A cracked and blistered wooden sign beside the road read:
TARN HOUSE
Half a League On
Famous for Our Hissing Eels
An inn would not be unwelcome, although Molloqos did not entertain high expectations of any hostelry that might be found along a road so drear and desolate as this. Come dark, grues and erbs and leucomorphs would soon be stirring, some hungry enough to risk an assault even on a sorcerer of fearful mien. Once he would not have feared such creatures; like others of his ilk, it had been his habit to arm himself with half a dozen puissant spells whenever he was called up to leave the safety of his manse. But now the spells ran through his mind like water through his fingers, and even those he still commanded seemed feebler each time he was called upon to employ them. And there were the shadow swords to consider as well. Some claimed they were shapechangers, with faces malleable as candle wax. Molloqos did not know the truth of that, but of their malice he had no doubt.
Soon enough he would be in Kaiin, drinking black wine with Princess Khandelume and his fellow sorcerers, safe behind the city’s tall white walls and ancient enchantments, but just now even an inn as dreary as this Tarn House must surely be preferable to another night in his pavilion bene
ath those sinister pines.
* * *
—
Slung between two towering wooden wheels, the cart shook and shuddered as it made its way down the rutted road, bouncing over the cracked stones and slamming Chimwazle’s teeth together. He clutched his whip tighter. His face was broad, his nose flat, his skin loose and sagging and pebbly, with a greenish cast. From time to time his tongue flickered out to lick an ear.
To the left the forest loomed, thick and dark and sinister; to the right, beyond a few thin trees and a drear grey strand dotted with clumps of salt grass, stretched the tarn. The sky was violet darkening to indigo, spotted by the light of weary stars.
“Faster!” Chimwazle called to Polymumpho, in the traces. He glanced back over his shoulder. There was no sign of pursuit, but that did not mean the Twk-men were not coming. They were nasty little creatures, however tasty, and clung to their grudges past all reason. “Dusk falls. Soon night will be upon us! Bestir yourself! We must find shelter before evenfall, you great lump.”
The hairy-nosed Pooner made no reply but a grunt, so Chimwazle gave him a lick of the whip to encourage his efforts. “Move those feet, you verminious lout.” This time Polymumpho put his back into it, legs pumping, belly flopping. The cart bounced, and Chimwazle bit his tongue as one wheel slammed against a rock. The taste of blood filled his mouth, thick and sweet as moldy bread. Chimwazle spat, and a gobbet of greenish phlegm and black ichor struck Polymumpho’s face and clung to his cheek before dropping off to spatter on the stones. “Faster!” Chimwazle roared, and his lash whistled a lively tune to keep the Pooner’s feet thumping.
At last the trees widened and the inn appeared ahead of them, perched upon a hummock of stone where three roads came together. Stoutly built and cheery it seemed, stone below and timber higher up, with many a grand gable and tall turret, and wide windows through which poured a warm, welcoming, ruddy light and the happy sounds of music and laughter, accompanied by a clatter of cup and platters that seemed to say, Come in, come in. Pull off your boots, put up your feet, enjoy a cup of ale. Beyond its pointed rooftops the waters of the tarn glittered smooth and red as a sheet of beaten copper, shining in the sun.
The Book of Magic Page 44
