Crooked Words

by K A Cook

Misgendering, transphobia, binary/gender essentialism, physical/emotional abuse/bullying, coming out, depictions of triggers and anxiety.

  Absent a Consonant: Coming out, depictions of anxiety, gender dysphoria and fear of transphobia. Binary lead character.

  Everything in a Name: Misgendering/naming, homophobia, coming out, emotional abuse.

  The Differently Animated and Queer Society: Ableism, homophobia, transphobia, depictions of social anxiety and privilege/oppression (via zombies).

  Old-Fashioned: Depictions of stalking (a Twilight deconstruction). Cisgender lead characters.

  Playing the Death Card: Reference to past sexual assault. Depictions of depression, momentary suicidal ideation and chronic pain.

  Certain Eldritch Artefacts

  Darius scrambled for the edge of the table, clutching at the tablecloth in an effort to stay upright. His hip brushed against something that clattered to the ground, and for a moment he thought he was going to scream from pure frustration. Not again, surely? It had to be possible that he could make it for more than about ten strides through the souk without creating another disaster? But no: a small clay pot teetered on the edge and hit the ground with an even louder clash, followed by the pinging bounce of several smaller items. Darius cringed, stood—and then found himself crashing into the looming chest of a man at least twice his height and counting.

  “Oh, I—”

  “Get off!” The man’s fist slammed into Darius’s ear with enough force that he again fetched up against the table, sending more items clattering to the ground. “Can’t a man shop in peace?”

  “I’m really, really—”

  “Gah!” The man shoved Darius aside and vanished into the crowd—leaving Darius to stand in the midst of the debris, confronted by a wailing stall vendor. Whoever knocked him into the table in the first place had long-since vanished into the crowd, of course.

  “Ah. Sorry. I’m…”

  “You! Boy!” The vendor leaned over the table and waved a knobbly stick through the air. “You watch where you’re going! I work a hard day’s living to sell those, and you think I’m going to let some fancy schoolboy just go ahead and damage my wares?” He reached out with the stick, swung it at Darius’s head. “Do you?”

  Darius ducked the first swing; the second landed with a heavy thwack on his shoulder, and he staggered down to one knee. “Ah … no, sir. Of course, sir. I didn’t mean—”

  The end of the stick connected with his abused ear, the pain sharp enough to make the souk seem to spin; Darius swore and fell in a dizzy, ungraceful heap onto a pair of leather shoes and the lace trim of someone’s petticoats, now half-stunned by the new, intense throbbing at the side of his head. The owner of the shoes shrieked, and Darius rolled under the trestle table just before the boot landed in his ribs. Under the table, at least, there was no one close enough to punch or kick. He lay still, panted, raised one hand halfway to his ear before deciding that no, he didn’t want to know.

  “You! You lousy cur! You pick those up, you hear!”

  Darius swallowed, far too aware that someone who wasn’t hiding would have already crawled out from under the table. He’d been through sandstorms and blizzards, he told himself. He’d travelled halfway around the world. He’d survived brigands and marriage proposals and terrible food. What were the dangers of traversing a mere market in comparison? Nothing, of course. So why couldn’t he make himself roll out from under the table and face nothing more dangerous than a crowd?

  “If anything’s broken, you’ll pay for it, you will!” The vendor’s voice rose to a grating screech. “Guards! Guards! There’s a—”

  “I’m picking them up!” Darius crept halfway out, headed for a gap between shoes and scooped up everything that didn’t look like rubbish in the aproned hem of his shirt—mostly brown, wizen little things that looked like dried-out monkey faces. He shuddered, only too able to imagine a set of trays covered with tiny faces, set out in the sun in the way sultanas and dates were dried with a midden of miserable, bleached-white monkey skulls sitting in a pit beside. What possible use would anyone have with monkey faces? “I’ll pay you, sir, I promise.”

  “I’m a hardworking salesman with a husband and children to support, and you come here, with your smarmy smile and your foreign coin, and expect to just waltz right in and commit property damage without any consequences at all?” The vendor thumped the stick against the table in time with each word. “No. I will not take it!”

  Darius thought the vendor had covered the consequences part quite well, actually, but now probably wasn’t the time for a philosophical discussion on the meaning of ‘consequences’. He grimaced, flicked something that wasn’t mud off his fingers, waved off the flies droning around and made a last pass across the ground. If he’d missed something—well, it’d just have stay missed, so he stood up and handed the monkey-faces to the proprietor, along with a suitable coin. “I’m so sorry,” he said again, and he blew the dirt off the closest monkey-thing. “I really am. Someone pushed me, you see…”

  “Get on with you!” The vendor whirled the stick around again. “Lazy schoolboys!”

  Darius didn’t even bother to try smiling this time; he just ducked and ran, stepping on several sets of toes and stuttering several apologies as he did so. Someone else cuffed him across the other ear, hard enough to send him tumbling into the side of a small hand-cart; an opportunistic hand grabbed at his belt, fumbling for the wallet he didn’t wear. It took him several moments to find a free, relatively safe corner by a cabbage seller, where he could huddle against the wall and watch the souk bustle past.

  Why, why did this last attempt to fulfil his quest have to be the most difficult?

  He drew in a deep, gasping breath, trying not to shake as he straightened his clothes and brushed the tips of his fingers against his swollen right ear. It felt five times as big as usual, which he knew from experience meant it didn’t look anywhere near that swollen, but just touching the outer edge increased the throbbing to a breath-taking jolt of pain, and he still felt dizzy. Maybe he should see a doctor.

  The Professors Roxleigh had warned him about merchants out to cheat him of every coin, soldiers who’d arrest anyone who looked like a thief, beggars with twisted limbs and Guild membership, and the pretty people up on the curtained balconies who decried their loneliness. Lady Plumeria and Amelia had warned him about the desert, the snow and the sea—and to be suspicious of peaceful-looking green pastures. Nobody had thought to warn him about the ordinary people who thought it all right to push, shove, cuff and hit anyone in their path. Why hadn’t they? He’d take on dragons over people—at least dragons could be reasoned with and had an appreciation for educated verbosity!

  Darius took a swig from his hip flask, drew in another fortifying breath and stepped out into the crowd—only to step on a woman’s foot and dart into the path of a pack-leaden mule. “Oh, I … sorry, sorry…”

  Several people glared at him. Darius gave them his best apologetic smile and scurried away.

  If, in future, Professor March or anyone else in the world wanted a sword, they could go and get it themselves. He, Darius, had had more than enough of questing—in fact, he was calling the whole thing quits. If he didn’t find the sword here, he was going home regardless, and if that meant spending the rest of his life trying to avoid dating the nice young ladies and gentlemen his father thought appropriate, so be it. Love wasn’t worth this. Why had he ever thought that finding the right sword would make any real difference, anyway?

  All told, Darius’s grand quest was a grand failure. It didn’t even cement his magical genius by requiring him to fire out creative alliterative verses on the spot: Darius hadn’t used his magic at all. He just asked about legendary talking swords, and, in the main, people, ogres and dragons seemed willing enough to help him—perhaps because Darius could make a good cup of tea and didn’t mind proofreading family histories. The real problem was that most of those fabled swords were either fakes, dearly bel
oved of their owners, or, worst of all, utterly authentic—but so damn irritating they were chained and buried in the deepest dungeons in a vain attempt for everyone in the village to escape their ceaseless chatter.

  Darius had become quite good at the art of the midnight runner, for every queen, lord, shopkeeper, ogre and farmer wanted nothing more than to bequeath their most noisy of heirlooms to someone else’s care. On the upside, he’d soon learnt that swords which sang bawdy folk songs without stopping provided enough noise that even he could escape undetected.

  This last sword, after a year of travel, was a rumour at best: a pair of drunk mercenaries he’d met on the Khaloun border suggested that an arms merchant in Rajad had acquired a lot containing eldritch weaponry, and one item might have been a talking sword, come to think of it—or was it a whetstone? They’d scratched their heads a bit and decided that there was a talking something in Rajad, and it might be worth his while. Darius didn’t have much faith in finding anything that wouldn’t drive him to cutting off his own ears, but it was worth a final look. Rajad hosted the largest marketplace in the world: where else, if he could not find what he wanted?

  If not—well, he’d go home and hide from the gentlefolk callers.

  It took Darius half an hour of knocking cauldrons,