Rogue artists, p.18
Rogue Artists, page 18
The Praetarc stopped for a moment. “Not about the money?” he said. “Then you must be . . . ” He took two more quick steps forward, and with a silent prayer to the Liar I slipped across to the painting of the ship. I didn’t hit the water, but aimed too high and ended up on the mast, hanging on to the ropes like a fool as the glow in my vision faded. As I adjusted, I could see he’d already turned around, and for the first time, the frown was gone. “So,” he said quietly. “It’s not about the money, and you’re a shifter. That means . . . she hired you.” He drew straighter.
I pulled myself back onto the mast and watched as he lowered the ball of light and took a few steps closer to the statue. “She hired you to steal this, thief,” he said, gesturing towards the necklace. “Do you want to know why?” Again, something seemed off.
“I don’t ask clients questions once I take a job, love,” I said. “They want something, I get it for them. Anything else ain’t part of the work.”
“It’s not work for her,” he said, staring down at the necklace. “She thinks something of mine belongs to her. And she’s wrong.” He bit the words out, like poison. The ball was dimmer now, but still illuminated his face, filling in and softening his features. “This is mine, thief. Mine alone.”
“Ain’t how she sees it,” I responded, digging my hands into the rough wood of the mast I was clinging to. He’d already guessed enough that I didn’t see the need to guard the rest of what little information I had about the woman who hired me—and I needed to draw him out.
Suddenly he laughed—a bitter, angry laugh. “No?” he said after a moment. “She was always stubborn and willful. I knew she would come for this someday, though not this soon. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.” He rested his hand on the statue’s head, slowly tracing his fingers down as he spoke. “I’ve always loved beauty, beauty in anything and everything. The perfect ratios in nature, the perfect symmetry of our sanctuaries. Beauty reminds us that we’re alive, strengthens our faith. When I met her in the Garden of the Ancients, I was admiring the beauty of the statuary . . . and she was so beautiful, so perfect, that for a moment I thought she was one of them. When she spoke it was like smooth paint over canvas, crystal blue seas and sparkling skies and endless rolling hills, all in one person. We spoke the same language, she and I. And when we were together, though it was forbidden, we were art and artist; we shaped each other, made each other, filled each other. Beauty.” His eyes were narrow, almost closed, and I watched him as I made my way down the mast to the deck of the ship.
His eyes opened again. “We made beauty together,” he said, taking his hand from the statue. “Right here, with this. You can see it for yourself. She had eyes as blue as the Kallitish sea, and hair brighter than the sun. We made this necklace and locket for her, because this child was all of us in one creature—all of our hopes, fears, doubts, passions. There was nothing else to wish for.” Suddenly I saw it on his face—the statue had the same angular cheekbones, the same angled brows, although what looked like anger and cruelty on his face was vibrant joy on the statue’s.
The Praetarc frowned again. “But as she grew older I learned she was like her mother in other things too: stubborn, willful, disobedient. I tried to teach her the lessons of the Church, show her discipline, order, judgment. But she wanted none of these; she wanted freedom and play and randomness. Chaos. Anarchy.” His lip curled. “She needed control, but her mother wouldn’t listen. She argued with me, told me I was too strict. As if letting a child grow wild, grow to waste and indolence like a weed, was a better fate for my daughter.” I crouched down on the deck, still scanning the room. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end up pleasant, and I could feel my heart beginning to race. “We quarreled more and more, and I grew angrier at her defiance,” he went on. “With her help we could have turned my child into something permanently beautiful, inside and out. Instead, she became . . . insubordinate and sullen. Ugly. And that I could not abide.”
My heart was pounding, and my head felt hot. Calm, love, patience, love, I thought, but I had little of those things left.
His grinding voice continued. “Her mother left me a note one day, a note which said only ‘I hope you find the beauty you seek,’ and she took my daughter’s locket with her,” the Praetarc said, frown deepening as he stared down at the statue. “My daughter. But I had already known what she might try, and I spirited the child away to a secret place of my own before the mother could take her, a place where I could develop her in the ways she needed without her mother’s interference. She tried to find my daughter, but I had hidden her too well. Yet my daughter grew listless; she lost her energy, even her defiance. I tried to show her,” he said, voice rising in anger. “I tried to show her what her life could be if she cultivated herself properly. But she ignored me, turned away from me, refused to eat or drink . . . ”
He stopped, then shook his head angrily, though I could barely see him through the haze of red in my vision. “I had this statue made in the likeness of what she was, and what she could have been. Just pure beauty, captured here for all time. And I took the locket back, because it, and this,” he spat as he gestured to the statue, “belonged to me, even if the mother—” Suddenly he stopped and turned towards my painting again. “Even if the mother doesn’t understand that.” He lifted the ball of light, which began to brighten again. “You tell her that, thief. You tell her that this locket is mine, and it’s her own willfulness which made it so. You tell her she ruined my daughter, but she won’t ruin my memories.”
Sagging as if I’d been pressed down, I put my hands down on the deck of the ship, feeling the planks shifting beneath my weight, the warmth of my hands flowing into the wood, the pounding in my head and heart. “I ain’t telling her nothing, nerk . . . ’cept that memories ain’t for sale, or stealing,” I hissed. “You stole your child’s life. You don’t get to keep anything else.”
The Praetarc’s expression darkened. “Then I’ll send her the message myself, with your filthy corpse,” he snarled, and lifted the ball high as the light flared into intolerable brightness. I thought he was going to blind me, but as he strode forward I heard the sound of a dagger being drawn from a sheath.
Move, love, an inner voice commanded. It’s dangerous to shift without seeing where you’re going, but if I didn’t get out now, I wasn’t going to get out at all. I ran forward and jumped off the deck just as I reached the side of the ship, trying to focus on my memory of the black and white sketch with the houses. I saw the Praetarc’s face, red and angry, as I flew past him into the sketch, banging painfully into the side of one of the houses. But I landed, and as I turned around to the sound of ripping and tearing behind me, I saw the Praetarc had slashed the ship, curls of canvas rolling to hang from the carved frame.
There was nowhere to hide here, and as he turned around, the ball of light getting brighter every second, I scanned as quickly as I could around the room, trying to remember the position of every painting and sculpture. He walked, then ran towards me, dagger high, and even as he closed in I was gone to the landscape painting, landing on my knees next to the haystack as the sounds of cutting and tearing echoed from behind me. The black and white sketch fell, shredded, and he turned again, looking like one of the stray dogs in the Alley when it ain’t had enough to eat. The light was so bright I could barely see, and as he ran towards the landscape I knew I was in trouble—I didn’t remember the decorative badge outside the window well enough to reach it, so I had to shift back further inside the room . . . away from escape. I shifted again and again, the Praetarc slashing or smashing every piece of art right after I left it, and with every destroyed work of beauty, with every shift as my heart threatened to beat out of my chest, my odds decreased. Shifting out of the art and into the room itself would weaken me so much I probably wouldn’t be able to stand, much less defend myself. But what was going to happen when I ran out of art to shift into?
Soon there were only two things left in the gallery. Breathing heavily, I crouched inside a vase painted with images of flowers and springtime as the Praetarc stalked towards me, rising like one of the vengeful archangels his Church liked to yammer about as his entire body glowed with light. “Nowhere left to go now, you filthy Alley vermin,” he growled. “Nowhere else to run.” My vision was completely dazzled, and I only heard him moving in, imagined the dagger he held in his other hand lifting high above his head, ready to smash my vase to pieces.
Then again, you was always an Alley rat, I thought. You was always going to die like vermin. I closed my eyes as I waited for the end. I wondered what the child felt when she was passing, what her journey was like. I wondered if the Praetarc had ever thought about that.
Then something flashed through my vision. The Praetarc. The child.
His robe. The statue.
I waited, imagined the Praetarc’s dagger in its last descent, pictured his robe in every detail I could. At the last moment I leapt forward into the branch and sword image on his robe’s back, just as the smashing sound of porcelain echoed behind me. Didn’t have much space to work with; I could feel the edge of the blade and the thorns of the branch cutting and poking me. But I could move. And if I could move . . . so would he.
With a yell I strained forward against the back of the robe, and the Praetarc jerked back as the robe pulled against his neck. Choking and sputtering, unable to cry out, he dropped the ball of light and dagger as I felt him scrabbling at his neck, trying to unfasten the robe. I paid no attention, wading forward like I was moving through quicksand, step by step, to the only other piece of art in the room. I lurched to the front of the statue, and there was only one other thing left to do.
“Rat,” the Praetarc gurgled, pulling uselessly at his collar, “ver . . . min.”
“No, love,” I whispered. “The only filthy thing to take down here . . . is you.” And with a last effort which felt like I was ripping my body in half, I pulled the robe and the Praetarc down onto the statue, shifting into the locket hanging from the necklace around its neck.
There was a terrible metallic crash, the sound of stone breaking. And then silence, silence like the dust settling over us as we lay on the ground. Ears ringing, head still pounding, I shifted from the locket into the room, almost falling over in exhaustion. The gallery was destroyed, a ruin of stone and canvas and paint. And there, on the ground at my feet, was the necklace, the smashed bits of the child’s statue . . . and the body of the Praetarc. Nothing in it now, of course. What was left of his soul was inside the jagged pieces of rock that used to be the perfect, beautiful image of his child.
Jagged rocks for a jagged soul, I thought. About right, love.
I heard the sound of footsteps running, voices calling, and I picked up the necklace from the ground and secured it inside my cloak. I staggered to the window, and with my last remaining strength, and shifts from the decorative badge outside the window to the gargoyles on the corners of the building to the corner of the street below, I was gone.
-
Two days later I was still weak, barely able to shift from one painting to the next in my own place . . . but I’d grown strong enough to smell when the woman returned, and to be ready for her. She was dressed the same way as when she first came, and she entered my home even more slowly than the first time. She reached the center of the room, squinting in the dim light, and waited for a moment. “I have come back,” she called out, voice sounding strained and ragged; I figured she’d heard at least some of the news. “I have come back, even though there may not be a reason.” She took a deep breath. “You killed him, didn’t you? I didn’t tell you to do that. I didn’t tell you to hurt him at all.”
“No, you didn’t love,” I said from my comfortable night landscape, trying to keep the hoarse tiredness out of my voice. “And I didn’t actually mean to . . . I was kind of forced, in the end. Truth is, he did most of it himself. I just . . . helped him along, you might say.”
She swallowed and nodded. “And the necklace?”
I brought up the lights on a pedestal I’d recently added, on the top of which was a velvet-covered stand. And lying on the stand . . .
She took a quick, shallow breath, and in a moment she was next to it. There she stood, staring down at the stand as minutes passed. “This . . . is real?” she finally asked, her question a prayer.
I snorted. “It better be. Ain’t nothing else to find at the Praetarc’s now, and I ain’t going back there again for love nor coin.”
Slowly she reached down, and picking up the necklace, she gazed into the locket hanging from it. With her other hand she squeezed its sides, and looked at the picture inside. But I was looking at her face. After a moment she closed her eyes completely, tears spilling from them and down her cheeks. A minute of her silent weeping passed before she opened her eyes again. “I . . . ” she started. “Thank you. I am so . . . grateful. You know what this is? Why I wanted it?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Now I know.” I hesitated; thoughts were still slow in coming, like they would be for a while longer while I recovered. “Would have done the same thing for mine. If I’d ever had the chance.”
The woman took a deep, broken breath. “The rest of your money,” she suddenly said, fumbling for her purse. “I have it—”
“Never mind, love,” I said, thinking of landscapes and beauty and wild gardens. “Consider it paid. But don’t spread that around in Caervaris, mind, or I’ll come and steal whatever you’ve got left, sure as sixes.”
She nodded, turned, and walked slowly but gracefully back to the entrance of the room, clutching the necklace. Right as she reached the door, she stopped and turned around. “Would you like to see it?” she asked, holding up the locket. “Would you like to see her?”
I thought about that for a long while. “No, love,” I finally answered, remembering. “I know exactly what she’s like.” And I brought the lights down in the room and leaned back in my painting, watching the twinkling stars in the perpetually dark indigo sky.
~
Gregory A. Wilson is the author of the novels Grayshade and The Third Sign, the award-winning graphic novel Icarus, called “fluent, fresh, and beautiful” by critics, and the 5E adventure and supplement Tales and Tomes from the Forbidden Library, along with a variety of short stories, academic articles, and books. He is also Professor of English at St. John’s University, where he teaches courses in speculative fiction, creative writing, and Renaissance drama. He is the co-host of the critically acclaimed podcast Speculate!, and under the moniker Arvan Eleron he runs a highly successful TwitchTV channel focused on story and narrative. He lives with his family in a two-hundred-year-old home near the sea in Connecticut; his virtual home is gregoryawilson.com.
Seven Stones to Throw
Jennifer Brozek
Maureen Burton put her tea cup down and decided it was time to get to work. She had procrastinated for too long—not just this morning, but for the entire month. Magical workings were delicate and important things that required an immense amount of attention. In this day and age of everything that was going on, that intensity exhausted her.
Then again, with the state of the world as it was, her sort of secret magic was needed more than ever.
Gathering her supplies, she moved her working to the covered and screened-in back porch. It was one of the Pacific Northwest’s rare, lovely and warm, near-spring days. Blue skies, fluffy white clouds, verdant plants swaying in a gentle breeze. Spring wasn’t quite here yet, but it peeked over the horizon.
Maureen settled the sweater shawl around her shoulders a bit more, then gazed at her tools. A small pile of smooth river rocks sat on a tray next to a pile of paper towels and cotton swabs. Next to the tray was a package of oil-based, multi-surface paint pens in a myriad of colors. She used to use oil paints and brushes, but found that these outdoor paint pens did a much cleaner job and were easier to work with. Also, they dried much faster. By the time she was done with one side, had taken a brief break, and was ready to complete the second, the first side would be dried.
She contemplated the river rocks. Each one had been gathered by hand, washed, and purified. They were now a clean template for today’s working. To the outside, mundane eye, she was about to embark on the harmless hobby of rock painting. What she was really doing was gifting magic to the world.
Each rock, painted on both sides, would be imbued with magic needed by the finder. A supernatural nudge in the right direction for both the finder and the world. Something to make everything a little better. She would paint seven stones today. Three mental. Three emotional. One that was both.
Choosing the first stone, Maureen turned it over and over in her hands, feeling its cool smoothness. On one side she painted a brightly colored question mark. On the other was the word, “Question”, also in bright colors and a halo effect in gold around it. Holding it up and admiring her work, she thought she would put this one near one of the municipal buildings in downtown Kendrick.
She imagined the person who would find and pick this stone up would be someone who lived life on a treadmill—moving fast, exerting energy, but going nowhere, doing nothing of import for themselves or the world. They would see its colors and word, be attracted to it, pick it up, and then . . . Well, that depended on the person. Put in a bag, on a shelf, maybe even added to another pile of painted rocks. What they did with it didn’t matter. The magic, the intent, would have already been imparted.
The second stone, just as smooth as the first was not a perfect oblong. Instead, it had a couple of waves to it, giving the rock a more abstract look. On one side, she drew a set of gears with painstaking precision then colored it in with green before dotting all around the gears in red, as if they were creating something new by working together. On the other side she wrote “Rethink.” This was a stone for someone too set in their ways. Calcified, she thought. She would put it near one of the smaller hospitals.
