Uncanny magazine issue 2.., p.7
Uncanny Magazine Issue 22, page 7
“You make a mistake,” the dead thing hisses.
“I prayed to you all my life,” Bryony replies, trembling mad.
Sallow strains against the cord, holding pressure against the angel-eater. He won’t let it escape. The rope burns his tongue and he digs his teeth deeper.
“I cherished you and what you meant.” She climbs onto the altar and stands over it, a leg on either side of its empty ribs. “I knew you were real, and I believed you would save me. But you didn’t.” She leans down, and in the blood-glow from Angelcorpse’s presence, her jaw and tongue reappear as ghostly as she is. She bares her teeth.
“And then you killed my dog,” she says, before she plunges the knife into Angelcorpse’s eye.
The world erupts, flinging Sallow across the cavern and into unmoving stone. He yelps and slides to the floor, dazed. He must get up. Must protect his girl. Hurry. Sallow struggles to his paws. His body aches more than any fucking dead thing should. But he has endured worse.
Over the altar stands another sliver child, and this one smells of ancient rage. It balances in the air over Angelcorpse’s skull. He races back to his girl-pup’s side, ready to defend her from this new ghost.
Don’t touch her.
The ghost blinks slowly and doesn’t turn away from his girl-pup. “What do you want, Bryony Angelkiller?”
Sallow’s ears perk and he skids to a halt before the altar. The ghost doesn’t smell hostile now, and it hasn’t tried to trick or hurt Bryony. He looks up at her, waiting.
“Everyone who has committed violence will turn to ash,” Bryony says, “and come the dawn, any person who chooses violence against another human—or a dog—” She looks down at Sallow and nods. “—Will know they too will die a heartbeat later.”
“You won’t have much of a world left,” the ghost says.
Bryony shrugs. “Anyone who’s left will learn to do better. Maybe in time we’ll all have a world worth keeping.”
“So be it.”
Another shudder ripples through the air. Sallow’s hackles bristle. The ground under his paws shivers like snow-pricked skin. He jumps back a step. The mist has sunk into stone and vanished.
In the distance, high above and outside, Sallow hears the sound of ash raining down across the world. He knows that all those who hurt Bryony are gone and he barks in approval. No one will ever hurt her again.
“Who are you?” Bryony asks quietly.
“First victim,” says the apparition with a shrug. “I don’t remember my name. Just that I was killed here long, long ago. My blood never truly left this place. I don’t remember who it was who held the knife.” Another twitch of ephemeral shoulders. “I do wish he’d left my name…”
“You can pick any name you want.”
“I can?”
“Of course.”
A moment of silence arches between the two, and then the ghost-child nods. “I like Vengeance. That’s my name now.”
Bryony hugs Vengeance, who hugs her back. “I’m glad,” Bryony says. “You don’t have to stay here any longer now, do you?” Vengeance shakes their head. Bryony smiles and then asks, “Do you want to come with us?”
“Not yet,” Vengeance says, considering the dead angel under their feet.
“Call for us and we’ll answer. I think we should make a new rhyme. Angelkiller, Angelkiller, she changed the story told.”
“I can think of more verses. I’ll tell you next we meet.” Vengeance smiles. “First, I’m hungry.”
Bryony hops from the altar and pats Sallow’s ears. “Let’s go, friend.”
Sallow wags his tail. She’s going to stay, and so is he.
They trudge back up the tunnel to see what kind of world they’ve shaped. Someone has to survive, and Sallow figures it might as well be him and his girl.
( Editors’ Note: A. Merc Rustad is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)
© 2018 by A. Merc Rustad
A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Cicada, and other fine venues, with reprints included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (2015 and 2017). Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com. Merc also has a debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, published by Lethe Press (2017).
The Cook
by C.L. Clark
The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. I’m standing in the inn’s common room and the other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. While some reach for a serving wench or boy, cheeks to pinch, a life to grasp—my stomach growls a monster’s growl. I should be slain; the growl is that fierce. I smell the roasting lamb, the unmistakable sneeze of freshly ground peppercorns, and garlic, but it’s all hidden behind the kitchen door.
A woman swears and laughs and swears again from that kitchen, and a boy comes out balancing trenchers of bread across his arms. Behind him, I see her wipe her hands across the measured curves of her hips. The back of her head is covered in short dark hair. She picks up a silver knife before the door slams behind the boy and the bread is at my table and I have thoughts for nothing else. But when I’ve stuffed myself to bursting, I hear her laugh again, and I’m not sure if I’ve imagined it or not.
After my companions and I have reveled away our fears for tomorrow’s campaign and some of them have passed out onto their tables, I rise to find my own bed.
She stands at the door of her kitchen, leaning, arms crossed beneath her chest. Her forearms are thick and knotted like braided dough. Her blouse is half unbuttoned, leading my eyes down the V between her breasts. The sheen of sweat, like condensation, makes me thirsty. She’s watching me—probably all of us, but I prefer to imagine that the sly smile is just for me.
“Gods’ blessings for the food,” I say, tipping my head.
“Come back alive,” she says. “There’ll be more.”
Her voice is delicious.
I come back alive.
She hands me my meal personally. There is no meat; war has ruined grazing and bloated the prices. But there’s butter, and rosemary, and warmed carrots that crunch when I bite them, and small roasted potatoes, skin crisped but flesh so soft that… I have to swallow tears. My friends hoot and cheer and pound the tables with their—blessedly—finally—empty fists.
I meet her that night in the kitchen. She has cleaned, but it still smells like yeast, that fermenting precursor to everything I’ve missed for months. A thumb of pale flour streaks across her dark forehead. Her hair has grown into short dreadlocks since I’ve been gone. She flings the rag over her shoulder and takes me by the hand. Pulls me closer. Leads me to her workspace. I am delightfully confused. When she bends me over and presses my breasts to the tabletop, I am delightfully afraid.
I’m not prepared for the dough-maker’s fingers, her fists, her forearms, the heels of her palms in the knots of muscle on my back as she pounds and stretches away the marching, the swords, the crouching, the shields, and the dead.
When my groans diminish to whimpers, and my whimpers slip to sighs, she lets me rise. My muscles sag with languor and I slump against her table. We stare at each other, two women alone in a kitchen with no intent to cook.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’ve skin the color of caramelized onions?” she asks. She brushes my scarred hand with burn-calloused fingertips. My hand. I imagine onions gone soft, brown and sweet, almost burnt.
With a scandalized laugh, I fall in love.
And so I stay with her, in the inn, for the next month. I never go hungry.
I am not so lucky the next time we leave.
Fewer than half of my companions return with me to her inn, and I, I can’t even turn my head or nod because of the jagged slice from my lower neck crossing to my left breast. The stained bandage is a foul butcher’s apron.
“I’ve got bread knives could do worse,” she says. But the tremor in her voice, and the way her eyes skim my lean, broken form, tell me that even she is unsure.
She delegates the kitchen to a younger woman not yet grown into her shoulders, and leads me to her room. She lays me down.
When she comes to me, her hands are cleaner than I have ever seen them. She unwraps me like a parcel she has waited too long for—uncertain she wants to see what’s inside. The smell assaults us both, and the battlefield stitching is an insult to precision.
She examines me like a piece of meat, and treats me as such:
First, she wipes me clean and pats me dry, humming under her breath, silent only when I wince. Then she leaves, and several minutes later, returns with a bowl of fresh herbs. Lavender, its scent covering something almost as foul as I was. Comfrey. I close my eyes as she presses them against my wound. I imagine her in her kitchen, chopping and tearing them, mashing them to paste, forearms rigid, forehead wrinkled in concentration. She is humming again.
I open my eyes and she smiles, then rewraps me. She nods, satisfied, but her lips are tight, twitching.
When we kiss, we taste salt.
© 2018 by C.L. Clark
Cherae graduated from Indiana University’s creative writing MFA. She’s been a personal trainer, an English teacher, and an editor, and is some combination thereof as she travels the world with her partner. When she’s not writing or working, she’s learning languages, doing P90something, or reading about war and [post-]colonial history. Her work has also appeared in FIYAH and Podcastle. Twitter: @C_L_Clark
In Blue Lily’s Wake
by Aliette de Bodard
Where Thich Tim Nghe stands, there is no time; there is no noise, save for the distant lament of the dead—voices she has once known, Mother, Sixth Aunt, Cousin Cuc, Cousin Ly, the passengers—not crying out in agony, or whispering about how afraid they were, at the very end, but simply singing, over and over, the syllables of a mantra—perhaps they are at peace, lifted into one of the paradises—perhaps they await their rebirth in a red-lacquered pavilion by the Wheel, sipping the tea of oblivion with the same carelessness Thich Tim Nghe now uses to drink her water, drawn from deep spaces…
In the chorus of the dead, there is one large, looming silence; the voice of the ship, forever beyond her, forever impervious to her prayers and entreaties—but then, wasn’t it always the case?
From the planet, the mindship’s corpse had seemed to loom large enough to fill the sky—hugged tight on a low orbit, held back from plummeting towards the surface only by a miracle of engineering—but, once she was in the shuttle, Yen Oanh realised that it was really quite far away, the pockmarks on its surface blurred and hazy, the distorted paintings on the hull visible only as splashes of bright colour.
“How long until we arrive?” she asked the disciple.
The disciple, Hue Mi, was a young woman barely out of childhood, though the solemnity with which she held herself made her seem older. “Not long, Grandmother.” She looked at the mindship without any sense of wonder or awe; no doubt long since used to its presence. The ship, after all, had been dead for eleven years.
Grandmother. How had she got so old? But then Yen Oanh knew the answer: twenty years of marriage; and another few decades in the Crane and Cedar order, dispatched across the numbered planets to check the spread of the Blue Lily plague in sickhouses and hospitals and private dwellings across the breadth of the Empire, from cramped compartments on the capital to the luxurious mansions of the First Planet, from those who could afford the best care to those who couldn’t.
Fifty-six years; and only one regret.
“We don’t often get visitors at this time of the year,” Hue Mi was saying. She was looking at the mass of the ship, looming ever larger in the viewscreen—normally it would be a private display on each passenger’s implants, but Yen Oanh had asked her to make it public.
“Oh?” Yen Oanh kept her eyes on the ship. The Stone and Bronze Shadow had been small by modern standards. As they approached the sleek hull vanished from view, replaced by a profusion of details: the shadow of a pagoda on the prow; the red fan surrounding the docking bays, and then only splashes of colours on metal, with a faint tinge of oily light. “The order has been here before.” Twice, in fact. She could feel both Sister Que Tu and Brother Gia Minh in the Communion—not saying anything, but standing by, ready to provide her with the information she needed.
And Yen Oanh had been there too, of course—briefly, but long enough.
Hue Mi’s face was a closed book. “Of course.” In the communal network—overlaid over Yen Oanh’s normal vision—her hand was branded with the mark of the order, a crane perched in the branches of a cedar tree. Vaccinated then; but it wasn’t a surprise. Everyone was, those days; and it would have been Yen Oanh’s duty to remedy this (and impose a heavy fine), if it hadn’t been the case. “It was… different back then, I’m told.”
“Very different,” Yen Oanh said. People dying by the hundreds, the Empire and the newly founded order foundering to research a cure or a vaccine or both, the odour of charnel houses in the overcrowded hospitals; and the fear, that sickening feeling that every bruise on your skin was a symptom, a precursor to all the ones blossoming like flowers on the skin; to the fever and the delirium and the slow descent into death.
At least, now it was controlled.
Hue Mi didn’t answer; Yen Oanh realised that she was standing still, her eyes slightly out of focus; the contours of her body wavering as though she were no longer quite there—and that the colours on the viewscreen had frozen. A seizure. She hid them well; she’d had another one in the time Yen Oanh had been with her.
Yen Oanh’s own seizures—like Hue Mi’s, a side effect of the vaccine—were small, and short enough that she could disguise them as access to the Communion; not as bad or as long as the fits that had characterised the plague, the warping of realities that stretched over entire rooms, dragging everyone into places where human thoughts couldn’t remain coherent for long.
Yen Oanh waited for Hue Mi’s seizure to be over; all the while, the ship was getting closer—closer to the heartroom. Closer to Thich Tim Nghe.
She didn’t want to think about Thich Tim Nghe now.
At length, Hue Mi came back into focus, and opened her eyes; the viewscreen abruptly showed the docking bay coming into view, permanently open, with the death of the Mind that had controlled the ship. “We’re here now,” she said.
Yen Oanh couldn’t help herself. “What did you see?” It was borderline impolite, made only possible because she was much older than Hue Mi, and because she was Crane and Cedar.
Hue Mi nodded—she didn’t seem to mind. Possibly her teacher was even more impolite than Yen Oanh. “I was older. And back on the planet, watching children run to a pagoda.” She shrugged. “It means nothing.”
It didn’t. The visions of Blue Lily came from the mind being partially dragged into deep spaces, where time and space took on different significances. Different realities, that was all; not predictions of the future.
Except, of course, for Thich Tim Nghe. Yen Oanh forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Your teacher does it differently, doesn’t she?”
Hue Mi grimaced. “Thich Tim Nghe doesn’t get seizures. It’s… you’ll see, if you make it there.”
“If?”
“Most people don’t like being onboard.”
No. She hadn’t thought it would be so easy, after all; that Thich Tim Nghe would be so readily accessible. “Brother Gia Minh?” she asked.
The Communion rose, to enfold her; a room with watercolours of starscapes and mountains, the walls of which seemed to stretch on forever—the air crisp and tangy, as if she stood just on the edge of winter—and the shadowy shapes of a hundred, of a thousand brothers and sisters who had gifted their simulacrums to the Cedar and Crane order, their memories of all the Blue Lily cases they’d seen.
Brother Gia Minh was young; perhaps as young as Hue Mi; wearing not the robes of the order, but the clothes of a poor technician, his hands moving as if he were still controlling bots. “Sister,” he said, bowing—then frowning. “You’re on the ship. The dead one.”
“Yes,” Yen Oanh said. “I need you to tell me what happened, when you were last here.”
Brother Gia Minh grimaced, but he waved a hand; and the room faded, to be replaced with the arid surface of the Sixth Planet. “Eleven years ago,” he whispered.
Eleven years ago, Gia Minh was called because he was nearest; and because he could handle bots—he was barely more than a child then, and not yet a member of the Cedar and Crane; merely a frightened boy with the shadow of Blue Lily hovering over him like a suspended sword.
He’d seen the ship, of course. It was hard to ignore as it slowly materialised above the planet—not all in one go, as he’d seen other mindships do, but flickering in and out of existence, as if not quite sure whether to remain there, as if it still had parts stuck in the deep spaces mindships used for travel. As if…
He hadn’t dared to complete the thought, of course. But when he’d boarded the ship with Magistrate Hoa and the militia, it came to him again. The corridors felt wrong—he wasn’t sure why, until he ran a hand on the walls, and found them cool, with none of the warm, pulsating rhythm he’d expected. The words in Old Earth characters should have scrolled down, displaying the poetry the ship loved, but they’d frozen into place; some of them already fading, some of them—
There were marks, on the wall—faded, dark ones, like giant fingerprints smudging characters.
“Magistrate,” he whispered.
Magistrate Hoa was watching them too, her eyes wide in the weary oval of her face. “It can’t be.”
Bruises. All over the walls and the floor and everywhere his gaze rested—and that uncanny coldness around them; and faint reflections on the edge of his field of vision—the characteristic delirium, the images and visions that spilled out from the sick to everyone else present.
