Little horn, p.1
Little Horn, page 1
Little Horn: Stories is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are creations of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2025 by Gemma Files
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design and interior layout by Alan Lastufka.
All interior illustrations by Gemma Files.
First Edition published October 2025.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-959565-57-4 (Hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-959565-58-1 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-959565-59-8 (eBook)
Oh the Larks.
—Joe Orton
STORIES
The Sanguintalist
Echo Chamber
Only Children
Pelican
Hagstone
Poor Butcher-Bird
Pear of Anguish
Bb Minor, or the Suicide Choir: An Oral History
Black Cohosh
Wet Red Grin
No Light, No Light
Oil of Angels
Yellowback
Little Horn
Acknowledgments
About the Author
A Note from Shortwave Publishing
And the Name said unto Cain, Thy brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.
I wake up covered in blood, but it’s not mine; I wake up covered in blood, and it is mine. Six of one, half-dozen of the other—take your pick. This is the world I live in and always has been.
I am a forensic necromancer for hire, of a very specific kind. Some of us work with flesh, some with bone, some with what flesh and bone leave behind. I once knew a woman who chased memories along their neural pathways, those electrochemical ghosts that can live on for days inside a corpse, even when its human topsoil is already being furrowed by insects looking for somewhere warm(ish) and easily permeable to lay their eggs, a field their children can eat their way free of. Her gift was a hard one, easy to mangle and misconstrue, like braiding tissue paper. Eventually, she ended up with a headful of other people’s voices and a datebook full of the sort of types fragile people really should best avoid, for fear of getting the pixie-dust rubbed off their little wings. I’m not entirely sure what happened to her in the end, but I do keep my eye out for any trace of her, lit or fig.
For myself, I work with the red stuff. It’s my calling. And easier by far than so many other things, given the relatively short window of its particular half-life. Accidents and murders, that’s my meat: a short stop, a sudden drop, a spatter or a pool. By the time it’s dry, it locks me back out, mostly. Or so I tell my customers.
They don’t need to know everything about you, after all, not when your relationship’s purely business.
So, I’m out picking up dinner, and my phone buzzes: ARSEHOLE NUMBER TEN, it says, because you need to be specific. Number Ten’s name is Satyamurthy. Murder Squad when he’s at home, and even when he’s not.
I sigh, thumb working. What you want? the blinking text asks him.
Another buzz. You, obviously. Here. And an address.
I’m eating. The cursor rests, and then: Do it fast, then. You might regret it.
You might be surprised.
Inhale my curry, then I’m off. The site’s not exactly walkable, but I grab a cab pretty easily. They don’t send cars for you, more’s the pity; don’t want your name on the record.
Satyamurthy’s outside, impatient, waiting to wave me in. His partner, Colville, turns around quick-time as I enter, hand almost twitching in the direction of that gun neither of them is supposed to have.
“Don’t step on the evidence,” she barks.
“Try my best,” I reply. It’s a challenge, all right—stuff is everywhere you look, splashed up high, probably from carotid and jugular at once, given how wide the corpse’s second mouth gapes. But she knows that.
The body’s nude, and basically faceless. Looks like someone did it with a brick? Everything’s all mushed up, red stuck with shards, shattered bone-bristles, the occasional tooth; hands are gone at the wrists, possibly for time’s sake, dumped somewhere they’ll end up similarly deconstructed. If it weren’t for the dick, lying snug and slack up against one gore-smeared thigh. . . ah, but that doesn’t always mean much, does it? Or less than it used to, anyhow, as I should know.
“You want a name, I take it?” I ask Satyamurthy, not looking up to watch him nod. Because my gaze is all on this one, now—that blank ruin, equally dented all over, only a rough geographic idea left to tell you where the eye-sockets should go. Yet there’s a pull to it nevertheless, a sort of gravity; I can feel it, even from here. It’s telling me bend down, get closer, ask my questions. It’s telling me it wants to tell me, so come meet it halfway, before its time runs out. Before the blood it’s still trying to shed finally goes cold.
You damn well wait your turn, I warn it, as I do.
Down on my haunches, a deep squat, arse to heels. I rummage through my pockets, slipping on my thumb-rings—antique bone, fossilized, worn so thin with use my skin tints them from the inside. Iron reinforcements so they don’t break under pressure, with sharpened horn set in a deep groove across my knuckles: right, left, curved like beaks, points extending well past my nails. Set them to the pads of my forefingers and they dent the skin; no scar tissue, see? I don’t have to break the skin to draw blood, never have.
Not when it comes when I call it.
Cruentation, that’s the old term—blood evidence. Bring a corpse with traces of violence into the presence of its suspected murderer and watch to see if it starts to bleed. Root of the word comes from the Latin, cruintare, to make bloody, and they really did use to not only pull that whole rigamarole, but bring it up in court afterwards, way back before proper forensics. Back when the intersection of maths, physics and biology, alchemy, religion and magic was a sight more slippery than it is today, and the same people who’d just learned you could see little bugs swimming around in a drop of water under a microscope’s lens still thought women’s wombs wandered around their bodies, getting all clogged with rotten sperm and producing fumes that made them go hysterical.
My blood to yours, then, and your blood to mine—cry out, make your plea, your last appeal. I’ll help you, if I can; justice isn’t always possible, but I’ll try my best. Hear you and remember from now on, either way.
This promise is an old one, older than old. My mother taught it to me, like hers taught her. It goes back forever.
We were priests and kings once, Lala, my little one, my Nani used to tell me, and still does, even when I don’t want to listen. Long before Kukkutarma became Mohenjo-daro, for all its name reflects our former glory. Before the glaciers grew and retreated, even, in the very morning of the world, when everything was equally unstable. When all our cities were graves, and all our graves, cities.
(Yes, yes. But this ain’t then, is it? And I’m on the clock and time is money, theoretical square root of this whole bloody late-stage capitalism barter system. I scratch Satya’s back, he scratches mine. . .)
That’s how it should go, anyway; almost always does. Even if we don’t often itch in quite the same places, him and me.
I close my eyes, feeling my fingertips pink and bruise as the drops start forming: all that tiny life, forever swimming and fighting, eating and dividing, without rest, or pity. Each globule a secret universe caught in the moment of creation, utterly unaware of its own precariousness, dim and scarlet and salt.
There’s a thrum in the air when the corpse’s blood recognizes mine, sparking, a struck string. A red mist rises from the body’s pores, sending out feelers, and I can already hear Colville draw breath behind me, give out a disgusted little grunt. It doesn’t break my concentration. I know my business better than that.
Now, I say, silent, tongue moving against my teeth, the roof of my shut mouth. Tell me now. Show me, if you can’t form the words. Let me see it.
Let me see it all.
Turns out, Satya takes notes on his phone, same as every other wanker working on a screenplay down at the local coffee shop. Probably helps to be able to send them to himself via email later on, though I doubt whoever manages Murder Squad IT security likes it much.
“Eithne Morden?” Colville repeats, reading over his shoulder, to which I don’t bother nodding.
“En-ya,” I correct her pronunciation. “Used to be Eustace, till she had it legally changed. You really did miss diversity training day, didn’t you, Detective? It’s all right; lots of Old Girls on the job these days, I’ll bet, now the Old Boys Network’s finally dying out. You’ll all have to catch up, eventually.”
She opens her mouth, but Satyamurthy waves her silent. “Skip the vinegar, Ms. Mirwani. Anything else we need to know?”
“She was down from the North, couch-surfing, staying with pals in Stepney. Came out to have a good time and mainly did, till she didn’t. The last place she remembers being is the Five-Pointed Star—dropped her phone in the washroom, but the person she left with stepped on it, ‘by accident.’ They said they’d pay to get it fixed, then dropped it down a drain, after. She was drunk enough by the time they got here, she can’t recall exactly how it happened, which I suppose is just as well. Last clear thing in her head is a really nice kiss, then
“And her clothes?”
“Like I said, she doesn’t know. I’d assume whoever did it burnt them, maybe in one of those cans over there.” Adding, as he raises a brow: “That’s what I’d do.”
“Hm. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Behind him, Colville sighs, crossing her arms. “Don’t reckon you caught a look at the bugger’s face, after all that.”
“Not how it works,” I tell her. “I see what they see, how they see it. You’ve watched me work before.”
“Ah yeah, cert. ’Cause that’d be far too easy.”
Now it’s my turn to shrug, stone-faced, even as the red ghost of Eithne’s memories hangs heavy in the air around me, refusing to dissipate just yet—a heady mixture of thwarted desire and terrible surprise, disappointment, familiarity: this was always a possibility in her life, one she’d accepted early on, same way I had to. Though I do like to think I’d fight harder at the end, if and when I find myself here. I like to think I’ve lived long enough not to walk into it with my eyes wide open anymore, glitter-encrusted and high on hope, led on like a lamb to slaughter by some toxic combination of dumb youth, drugs, and alcohol.
“It was a woman, I know that much,” I tell Colville. “Eithne wouldn’t’ve gone with her, it hadn’t been. And not some straight woman putting on a show to pull a bit of the new, either, or a lady who goes both ways—girls don’t hang ’round the Five-Pointed Star unless they’re queer through and through, no matter their accoutrements. It’s a bi-phobic bloody dive, that one.”
“Been there a lot, have you?”
“Enough to know.”
“And why does this not surprise me?”
“Well, you do look a bit hard to surprise, Colville, sad to say. Rather a disappointing way to live, I’d think.”
And here the banter ends, thank fuck. Satya puts his hand up, reins her in, gives me the nod; the both of them sod off, leaving me with Eithne. Not really a place to hang around much longer if I don’t want the hangover I’m courting already to last into tomorrow, but there’s still a few loose ends to clear up—you have to be polite, always, when dealing with the dead, especially those killed traumatically. They appreciate gentleness.
Need to go now, love, I tell her, slipping my finger-rings back off again. It’s a cold place, this, and there’s nothing much left worth seeing. I’ll do my best to make sure things go right, from here on in.
From her blood’s dimming tide, eddying ever downwards, I can still hear the last few rags of her voice issue, so small and sad. Asking me:
But why, sis? She really did seem like she liked me.
They all do, darling, in the moment—that’s the hard bloody fact of it. But it isn’t your fault, you have to know that. Or hers either, if you can believe it.
. . . why not?
I shut my eyes and take a breath before I answer, long enough to settle myself so I can be dispassionate about what I have to tell her, circumstances notwithstanding. Seeing, as I do, one more awful flash of Colville’s face seen through Eithne’s cunt-struck eyes, caught in that split micro-second of transformation: desire to calculation, lips reshaping in a wolfish sort of half-grin that doesn’t quite reach her gaze, because someone else’s has just. . . dropped over it, like a filter. Two phantom fingers hooked through her medulla and poised to twist, turn down the empathy, turn up the all-too-human atavistic urge to rip and rend and tear. That crossover point where kiss becomes bruise, becomes bite, adding a vile cannibal savour to the sauce; lustmord, that was the term, back when old Sigmund Freud was first slapping his dick-centred psychological worldview together before inflicting it on the rest of us poor sods, no matter how nature, nurture, gender, and anatomy might admix.
Colville, completely unaware of how exactly she woke up feeling so sore this morning, but still with that tiny little bit of a shine about her, the after-trace of someone else’s magic. Hadn’t known if I was right until Eithne showed me, but here it is in all its former glory, a sigil set to flame between her brows like a tiara’s centre-stone—something roughly triangular, point down to signal malign intention, a signpost to the Left-Hand Path. And inside it, shimmering, a filigree made from lines and loops crossing over each other at odd angles, impossibly compact.
I study it till I’ve got it down, then file it away for tracing in my memo book, once I’m done with the immediate; think I know the right person to take it to, difficult though that’ll be. But one way or the other, it’s nothing I’d ever bother Satyamurthy with, even if it didn’t point directly to the bitch who plays his backup.
She’s just a tool, after all; innocent, at least of this. And maybe she really did find her target beautiful for those few flirtatious minutes, if only because whoever turned her on poor Eithne told her to. Maybe the something new she’s learned about herself will even keep on resonating away under the hood, albeit subconsciously, formal lack of gender identity jargon aside—I mean, I don’t ever expect apologies, or anything like that. But considering how she and Satya come linked at the hip, be nice to get through a few of these meetups without her constantly trying to point out how I should feel shite about the way I’m made, even by implication.
Because she was used, that’s all, I tell Eithne, finally. Used and thrown away, just like you but worse, ’cause she’s forgotten all about it.
“But worse?” I’m the one who’s dead, sis.
I know, love. I’m sorry. But. . . you’re the one who’s free now, too, free of it all. And her, until she knows the sin she’s committed. . . she never will be.
Does that help, though? Probably not; wouldn’t for me, if our places were reversed. Still, Eithne seems like she’s a better person—was a better person. Better than I’ll ever be, by far.
I’ll make it right, I promise again, rage washing up over me from my deepest parts, poisoning myself from the inside-out with it, against everything my Nani ever taught me: need to be hard and sharp, from now on, considering who I’m going to be dealing with.
Because We stay away from each other, Lakshmi-child, she always used to tell me, even back when my Mum still insisted my name was Latif. Especially those who deal with the living, not the dead. . . stay clear, let them damn themselves in their own ways, and meet their own punishments. When magic calls you take note, but do not answer. It will call you to your doom, if you let it.
And God knows she had the right of it too, as I well know myself, from almost every time my path’s crossed another magician’s—but who else can we trust to police each other, if not ourselves? Who else is qualified?
(No one can say, Lala; no one knows, or ever has. Not even me, or you.)
Exactly, granny. And since I’m gonna die either way, just like everyone else. . .
Eithne gives one last sigh and leaves me. I stand there alone in the dark, trying not to shiver; above me, there’s a skittering from the rooftop, the unseen rafters. Birds, or rats, or bats.
You do what you must, my Nani whispers inside my skull, the curl where ear meets cartilage meets bone, making my jawbone thrum in sympathy. Only be careful, Lala, when you do. There are so few of us now, and you. . . you are one of the last.
“Not dead as yet, though,” I say out loud, like I’m making another promise. And turn to go.
When you’re born something people don’t expect, you learn to value being valued, and pretty damn quickly. That’s the core of what attracted me to Caelia Asperdyne, in the first place—I mean, beside her being beautiful, and sexy, and posh. Besides her being at least as outstanding in her chosen field as I ever was in mine, if not more so.
There’s a tradition of hijra in my family, spoken or not; if you’re born to the blood, no one much cares how your bits dangle or don’t, unless there’s literally no one left to breed more little necromancers. But there’s not a lot of women, cis or otherwise, who choose the path of Haute Magie; plain truth is, the High Hermetic Arts appeal mostly to detail-obsessed system junkies who get off on getting all the bells, whistles, flourishes and correspondences right for their own sake, and that almost always means blokes. The women I’ve met who took up a Path did it either ’cause they wanted something right away, too badly to bother with a learning curve, or ’cause the magic wanted them too badly to leave them alone.
