 
#

Plasma Frequency Magazine

Issue 5: April/May 2013

Cover Art by Luke Spooner inspired by "Good Deeds in a Weary World"

eReader Edition

Editor-in-Chief, Richard Flores IV

Assistant Editor, Amy Flores

Assistant Editor, Molly Moss

Assistant Editor, JT Howard

Assistant Editor, Alex Sidles

Art Editor, Vacant

Marketing and Advertising, Vacant

Plasma Frequency ISSN 2168-1309 (Print) and ISSN 2168-1317 (Electronic), Issue 6 June/July 2013. Published bimonthly by Plasma Spyglass Press, Vacaville, California

Annual subscription available at www.plasmafrequencymagazine.com. Print edition $56 for US residents for one year. Electronic edition available free.

Copyright © 2013 by Plasma Spyglass Press. All Rights Reserved.

www.plasmafrequencymagazine.com

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# In This Issue

Cover Art by Luke Spooner

From the Editor

Be My Cure

By Sara Puls

By the Stars You Will Know Her

By Siobhan Gallagher

Art By: Laura Givens

Cognitive Terminal Velocity

By Adam C. Richardson

Slaying Dragons

By Brent Knowles

Witchdoctors and Tears

By Jeff Bowles

Good Deeds in a Weary World

By Rebecca Roland

Book Review

Rogue Hunter: Inquest

Art By: Tom Wieja

Knowledge You Can't Give

By Brynna Ramin

The Hanging Gardener

By Ryan Harvey

Year One Anthology and Celebration Details

#  From the Editor

I can't believe we have already come to this point. Issue 6 completes our first publication year. Just about one year ago I had this crazy idea that I could run a magazine. I invested a large chunk of my money and got started. I still continue to put large amounts of my own money into this, but I no longer work on this magazine alone.

While we are still in our infancy when compared to some of the other publications out there, we are certainly lucky to have survived our first year. So many publications don't make it this far, and it isn't from a lack of trying. There are many things that conspire against a fiction magazine. If you lack contributors, readers, or money you will fail no matter how hard you try.

We have been fortunate. We have had some extremely talented submissions. And unfortunately we have had so many that not all of them have been published by us. Some took several tries, some are still trying, but all of them are appreciated. We look forward to publishing many more great talents in the future issues.

Money has been scarce. This magazine is almost entirely funded by my own money, with the exception of a few advertisers. There was a few times where I didn't know how I would pay for the next issue. But I believed in this magazine, so I sold my belongings to keep it running. And now, I am glad I have done that to see Issue 6 make its way out to our subscribers.

Our readers have been amazing. We hear from them on Facebook, Twitter, and in emails. They appreciate what we publish. They enjoy what we do. And they enjoy what our writers and artists put together. So we are thanking our readers in several ways.

After you read this issue, the back pages will talk about our Year One Anthology. You, the readers, will get to vote for the content you will see in this anthology. You will also get a chance to take a survey about how our magazine proceeds in our second year. Finally, as a thank you to all of you we have all the details of our celebration giveaway. Win a slew of prizes as our way of saying thank you.

Issue 6 has all the stuff we are known for. Science Fiction, Humor, Fantasy, Horror, another book review, and the talented artists you expect to see. We have some new names to the writing scene, which will get to finally add a publication credit to their bios. We have a artist that is new to our magazine as well.

Now, let me step aside and let the work of our writers and artists shine. Enjoy.

Richard Flores IV

Editor-in-Chief

#  Be My Cure

# By Sara Puls

I have electromagnetic-destroyerism. It is not a superpower, much as it sounds like one. And it's not a curse, not technically speaking, anyway. What it is, if I understand all the scholarly babble correctly—and I can't promise that I do—is a (rarely) contagious, highly disruptive disease.

Some say it's hereditary. Others say it's just bad luck. Still others say it must be karma. _Must be_. For what my opinion's worth, I say it's a combination of the three.

~

The definition of electromagnetic-destroyerism appears in the Merk Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy as well as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In both manuals, you will read the following:

Electromagnetic-destroyerism is the disruption of a human being's ordinary electromagnetic force, caused by emotional deficiencies, the random reorganization of cellular materials, and other, still undeterminable factors. The electromagnetic disruptions frequently result in the destruction of numerous objects, things, articles, items, gadgets, and entities; plans, objectives, aims, goals, ambitions, and intentions; relationships, affairs, partnerships, affinities, and bonds. It is one of the more rare and most severe physical complication-manifesting emotional deficiency disorders known to exist within the human species.

I am told it took a lot of fancy doctors and consultants (magicians, alchemists, engineers, spiritualists, techies, sorcerers, and repairmen) to come up with this definition. In my opinion, it's total crap. Still, electromagnetic-destroyerism does have rather predictable characteristics.

In the interest of time, I'll state just a few of the things you'll likely experience should you contract this most annoying of conditions.

One: If you catch electromagnetic-destroyerism, you will set off every metal detector you ever encounter. Even if you aren't wearing any metal—no, _especially_ if you aren't wearing any metal—and even if it's across the room or a hundred yards down the hall. You will be searched, with invasive thoroughness, on a regular basis. The TSA, for example, is not friendly to those with electromagnetic-destroyerism. They won't understand your doctor's chicken scratch explanation, which you will carry with you everywhere, as if it were your lifeblood, your soul. You will miss your flight. You will miss all your flights and you will learn to drive. Or walk. Or you will just stay home.

Two: You should expect to need a new computer every other week. This is a serious investment, so buy cheap or, as I did, learn to use a typewriter instead. Relatedly, expect all of your electronic devices to malfunction, crash, and occasionally burst into flames on a regular basis. Extreme static will become a familiar, if not welcome, noise. So will first-degree burns.

Three: You will suffer the frequent disappearance of your teeth. You may find them again—in the toaster oven (if it still works), or the laundry, or in the bottom of your shoe. Then again, you may not. Only time will tell. (I'm currently missing three teeth. Don't worry, they're not ones you can easily see.)

Four: You will experience extreme listlessness, overwhelming sadness, and on occasion, thoughts of suicide. These are the most serious of symptoms. (These are the symptoms that, in my case, began first, hit the hardest, and hurt the most.)

There you go. Those are some of the problems sufferers of electromagnetic-destroyerism face. This is not speculation or theory, no. This is concrete fact, borne out of real experience. I've experienced all of these.

Understandably, anyone not familiar with the condition tends to see these things as merely coincident, as unrelated misfortunes, as strange biological quirks and technological hiccups (and, for the lawyerly types, product liability claims just waiting to be filed). But this is not the case.

Oh that it were.

~

The doctors and therapists call electromagnetic-destroyerism by its acronym, "EMD," for short. I never do. Not anymore. Once I did, just once, and the following week proved the most challenging of all.

I won't scare you with all the details. I'll just say this:

All foods began to taste of anxiety and adrenaline. All drinks began to taste of liquid metal. All the air began to smell of rust and electrical fires. All the energy within me dissipated into despair. The feeling was one of thermite burning through steel.

And it did not end there.

Soon enough I decided that electromagnetic-destroyerism is not just a condition, not just an irritating syndrome. It is something more. Something with power. Maybe even a spirit. Yes, in truth it feels more like a curse than like a disease.

I explained all this to my doctor, thinking he might want to know, might want to pass the information on to the medical community. With his big, bug eyes, he looked at me and said the following:

"My dear, electromagnetic-destroyerism is not a curse. It is just like any other disease. It simply requires medication."

That's when I knew my doctor didn't understand. Not in the least. And how could he? He didn't have it. He wasn't even sick. He only poked and prodded those who were.

After that, I began to see an alchemist instead.

~

I am told there have been three documented cases of electromagnetic-destroyerism throughout the history of modern medicine. The first was diagnosed in 1903. The second in 1905. The third is me. I am told there are potentially other individuals living with the disease elsewhere, throughout the universe. I'm not sure what to think of that. If it is true, then I have a lot more questions, only several hundred of which pertain to electromagnetic-destroyerism. Also, I don't imagine I'll ever be able to afford a phone call to outer space, let alone an entire trip. So such information is only minimally useful to me.

But I digress. Back to the point:

I've never met anyone else quite like me. This, I suppose, is because the disease is exceedingly rare.

I googled it once, out of curiosity, even though I already had all the pamphlets and printouts one could ever need. Google produced two relevant results: the Merk Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy definition, as well as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definition. That's it. Oh, it also suggested an article from the Russian news source _Pravda_ , entitled, "USA frightens China with super destroyer, China laughs." I read the article just for fun. It's about the most advanced warship in history, the _super-stealth silver bullet_. The key words, if I were making a list, would include: modernizing, seven billion dollars, invisibility, Zumwalt, projectiles, and, my absolute favorite, underwater travel at rates faster than the speed of sound.

By the time I finished reading, I'd never felt more alone. Not for a minute. Not ever.

This is not to say I haven't heard anecdotes of people with similar problems. I have. Plenty of them. And with these occasionally unfortunate souls, I empathize. I do. But one or two incidents in as many years is not the way of electromagnetic-destroyerism. No. Not the way of it at all.

~

I do not want anyone to pity me. That is not what I need or ask. We enjoy what we can and endure what we must. Someone important once said something like that. Von Goethe, I think.

Anyway, if we're going to do this, if this is to work, you mustn't pity me. I won't allow it.

And I won't pity you, either. Not for one minute.

Your eyes are so deep and sad, yet so bright. I cannot help but hope for the best. For a friend who isn't afraid of my problems. A lover who also knows pain and weirdness and chaos, but still seeks simplicity and peace.

~

Probably, you are wondering whether there is a cure. I wondered, too. A salve, a potion, a lotion? Maybe a pill? A dance, a trance, an injection? There must be something, I thought. Just what could it be?

It wasn't the doctor or therapist who told me. It was the alchemist.

I'll tell you what it is, on one condition—no, two. First, you cannot laugh or run and hide. Second, you must share. You must share this bit of pseudo-medical, semi-magical advice. Share it with anyone you encounter. Because you never know when electromagnetic-destroyerism might attack. It's tricky like that. And the longer you have it, the harder it is to shake free.

Making it sound as easy as one, two, three, this is what my wise old alchemist said:

"One: Wait with patience and poise. Do not let despair overcome you. Do not let the world, the chaos get you down. Two: Keep an eye out for another being like yourself. The similarities across the spectrum of emotion and experience must be strong. You will know when you have found the one. Three: Fall in love. Fall madly, deeply, forever in love. Do not look back. Do not harbor regrets."

"If you do all this," my alchemist said, "you will feel better. Your symptoms will decrease and recede. You will not be cured, per se, but you will be a new you."

That's it. That's the cure. At least according to my alchemist. Her name was Sadie.

~

Earlier, I said that I'd never met anyone else quite like me. Until now, that is. Until you.

You've told me your secrets and you've revealed your inner chaos, your sicknesses. And now I've revealed mine.

Maybe we're moving a bit fast, maybe this is a bit too much. But I don't care. I've been alone, hiding behind my condition—beneath the strange events and actions and behaviors that make up what is me, what is my life—for far too long.

I'm done wasting time.

This is the new me. This is me fighting my predispositions and refusing to accept bad luck. This is me opening my heart to you and the world. This is me letting karma work for me instead of against me. For the very first time.

Please don't let me down. Let me take comfort in the twinkle of your eye, the warmth of your arms. Be my cure and I'll be yours. With pleasure and endurance, for all of eternity, I'll be yours.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Sara Puls is an employment law attorney for a non-profit law firm. She's also the co-editor of a new speculative fiction magazine, Scigentasy: Gender Stories in Science Fiction and Fantasy, which will have a website up and begin taking submissions in late May 2013. Her fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Goldfish Grimm's Spicy Fiction Sushi, Kazka Press, Liquid Imagination, Misfit Quarterly, Stupefying Stories, and elsewhere. Her Twitter handle is @sarapuls.

#  By the Stars You Will Know Her

# By Siobhan Gallagher

#

She strode across star-filled waters that knew no distinction from the sky above. Shadows clung to her form, made her enigma.

But he could make out her eyes.

She had the eyes of an ancient: mists and lightning swirling into a maelstrom galaxy, a kind of chaos that would pull you in if you gazed too long.

And yet he stared.

She came closer to where he stood on the bank, shadows spreading forth from her back and forming great bat-like wings.

He trembled and took a step back. If he had any sense, he'd run.

She reached out, and a breeze wrapped around him, embraced him tight. His pulse ignited, blood throbbing in veins. He smiled.

She crept closer. An apparition of a mouth appeared on her face and moved soundlessly. He leaned forward, trying to make it out.

A light, like dawn. The world faded.

~

His keyboard was pressed up against his cheek. He stared blearily at the glowing screen and rubbed his face. Couldn't believe he'd fallen asleep. Bad habit, staying up to work. He stretched, cracking joints, and looked back at the screen, vision a little less foggy now. Notepad was open, a few computer algorithms and...words? A sentence. What _she_ had tried to say in his dream.

Please create me.

~

He threw the hunk of clay down, pounded it, poked it, folded it, rolled it till he had a shape. Wasn't sure of the shape, but he piled more clay on.

The apartment door opened and a pair of heels walked in. "Hey Amit," Marci said from the living room, "brought your mail."

"Oh, thanks." He buried his knuckles in the clay; it became warmer with each touch of his hands.

Marci walked into the kitchen, her heels gone. "Sculpting, huh? Can you make me a vase?"

Underneath his hands, the shape formed, became more defined, more organic. A head. That's what it was, a head.

"Hey!"

He jerked his head up. Marci had her hands on her hips, mouth twisted into a frown. She looked prettier when she smiled.

"Sorry. It's this project. I tried to render 3D models of the subject and it didn't come out right. But with clay..." He held the blank head, his fingernails scoring where the ears, the nose, the mouth would go.

"Yes?"

"It's easier to visualize. Get a better handle on it."

"Is this the project you're working on with Nate?"

"No, it's...personal."

"All right, clean up after you're done. I'm having friends coming over later."

"The cute ones?" He grinned.

Her expression softened, arms at her side. "They're _all_ cute, actually." A slight smile crossed her face. "Anyway, need to get ready."

He nodded as she went up the stairs. They shared the apartment, but each had their own room and bathroom. Saved a lot of money that way.

He laid his hands on newly formed shoulders, nice sturdy shoulders that flowed into a graceful long neck. He placed the head atop the neck, and it fit just right, its chin raised in approval.

~

The laptop screen glowed dully, displayed a cold grey figure suspended in lifeless animation. He rubbed his chin, his fingers scraped against stubble. Forgot to shave, did he? Spent the whole afternoon working on the sculpture, and now here he was, up late working. And for what? So Nate wouldn't be on him? That guy should get laid more.

He punched in some numbers...he eyed his fingernails. Chunks of brown were lodged underneath them. He grabbed a mechanical pencil from his cheap desk and started chiseling away.

A knock at the door.

"It's open," he said.

Marci peeked in, her face freshly washed. "Hey Mister Leave-the-Lights-On, what are you up to?"

"Not working." He tossed the pencil aside. "Friends gone home?"

"Everyone except for Sandy. She had too much wine."

She stepped into his room, dressed in a fuzzy aqua-green bathrobe, her wet chin-length hair clung to the sides of her face. Looking like that, she seemed so innocent, a bashful girl caught outside the bathroom before she had a chance to scurry into something more decent. It had his blood warming up.

He smiled and scooted over on his bed, making room for her. The laptop turned off for the night.

He massaged her strong shoulders, kneading his fingers into bronze flesh, so alike the clay. With a body like hers, no wonder she was so popular—and so out of reach.

"This is nice." A yawn broke her steady breathing.

"Oh c'mon, you can't be tired."

She pulled away and stood with her robe in hand. "Sorry. Got an early day tomorrow."

He sat hunched, his hands doing nothing. "It's already tomorrow."

"Well, whatever." She hid another yawn behind her hand.

"You can sleep here, you know."

She gave a quick laugh. "You're a big boy, you can sleep by yourself."

He pressed his lips together and stared at her feet. "Right."

Maybe she didn't notice or care, either way, she left. And he was alone.

~

She was clearer now, her head and shoulders revealed, earth-tone skin like an Amazonian goddess. Her dark hair twirled as though a breeze was constantly playing with it. They sat together on a sandstone that jutted out over the cool blue lake.

"The waters are lovely," she said, her voice soft compared to her bold features. "A god cried from the heavens, and it became the lake."

"Gives a whole new meaning to 'cry me a river'." He winced at his own words. That was stupid. Here he was with a magnificent woman and like always, he was screwing it up.

She threw back her head, laughter rippled and rolled from her mouth, coming in waves. Afterwards, she had tears in her eyes. "It's good to be with you."

He blushed. "Can't say anyone has laughed at my jokes like that."

"That's a shame. You're far more imaginative than any of the others."

"Nah, I'm—"

"No, you are. That's why I trust you." She looked down at the waters, somewhat sad. The tears were still in her eyes—of course, she had no hands to wipe them away.

He'd hug her if she actually had a body. Her body—right, he needed to finish her, prove her trust in him. Rather do that than work on a project with Nate; that guy would sooner die than say 'good job' to you.

With some hesitation, he touched her shoulder. So warm. "Don't worry, you'll be created."

~

Marci leaned over him as he worked, her breath on the back of his neck. Pretty sure she didn't intend it to be sexy. In only a few days, he'd managed to complete the torso; quite elegant, beyond anything he thought he could do. Marci mentioned that the boobs were too small—for her, maybe. The woman from his dreams didn't strike him as large chested, more like a slender nymph...

"Who is that, anyway?" Marci said.

"Just something I dreamt up."

He attached a wing, not nearly as grand, but there was only so much room in the kitchen. She'd understand. She— _she_ should have a name, something a bit more meaningful than 'the woman from his dreams'.

"Some sort of anime?"

"What?" He turned to her. As soon as he did that, the wing landed with a wet _smack_ on the tile.

"Shit." He held the wing, slightly deformed. Too heavy. He'd have to skewer it in with wooden stick...did they even have sticks? He got up to look.

Marci stood in his way. "Hey, aren't you listening?"

"To what?"

She frowned. "To the movies, I asked you if you wanted to go."

That took him back. Movies—with Marci? It was always _him_ trying to get her to go.

"As in a date?"

"Don't be silly. Just thought you'd like to get out. You're always working on that thing."

Any hope he had went sinking to bottom of his feet. A date with Marci? Yeah, right. He looked down at the wing in his hands, the edges of it rippled with a detail never noticed before. Seemed like mist had touched it up with soft brush strokes, delicate lines in the fleshy clay. He bent close to examine it. Had he really done that?

"Heeelllooo."

He stood straight, blinked a few times. "Oh, what?"

"Oh my God," she muttered. "Do you want to go or not?"

He rubbed his left temple, leaving a smear of clay there. The bit of coolness comforted him, put his thoughts in order. He turned and placed the wing on some plastic laid out across the table.

"No thanks, I have to finish this." Someone was _actually_ counting on him.

~

"I sang to the mountains as they rose from the earth."

The sandstone underneath them became hard stone and the lake waters receded. Wind blew with all the strength of a hurricane—nearly forced him off the cliff—but she held onto him. She was like a mountain herself: immune to the wind's push and pull.

Got to admire that in a woman.

As the wind quieted, stars appeared all around them, each a radiance of warmth. She sang a note and one star flared up. Her voice went on, low and soft; the stars seemed to sway to her music, caught up in a melody of tides.

"Wow," he whispered.

"They enjoy it."

"Yeah..." A thought then struck him. "Do you have a name?"

Her gaze switched from the sky to him. The stars clustered above her like a cosmic rain cloud. Perhaps her name was supposed to be written up there. In vain, he tried to read it.

"It's old. And I've forgotten."

"That's all right. It's not a big deal."

But from the look in her eyes, it did seem to matter, greatly. It was a part of her, after all, and she wouldn't be complete without it.

"If I can create you, maybe I can give you a name, too."

She smiled, a gorgeous smile that brought lightning to her eyes. "I would love that."

~

His hands glided over the sculpture's thighs; so warm. He'd posed her with legs tucked underneath, looking out across something vast and great. That seemed fitting. It could be the waters or the night sky she was staring at—and speaking of which, what about her name? He walked around, observed her from every angle for an inkling of an idea. To be honest, he was never good at names. All his project files were titled: Project1, Project2, Project3...

"What's that song you're humming?"

He whirled around to face Marci. "Huh, what? Oh. Just something I heard on the radio."

Marci screwed up her brows. "Come out to the deck with me."

"Why?"

"Just c'mon." She yanked him by the arm, and they went upstairs.

They had to go through her room to reach the deck; the whole reason she claimed this room was so she could sun bathe topless on the deck—not that he ever sneaked a peek.

The sun was setting; deep orange splashed against vermilion coated the horizon, making rooftops and office buildings stand out.

"Wow, it's that late already?" he said.

"I'm worried about you—hey, look at me!"

He looked at her. She'd been frowning, the lines around her mouth deeply set.

"Nate called, said you haven't sent him your share of the project."

"He's being impatient, we have another month before the—"

"And when's the last time you ate?"

"Uhh, I had a breakfast roll..."

"Look at you! You've been spending all your time with that..." She made a hand gesture.

"It's only a sculpture."

"It's weird. It's like you've created a...a _person_."

That was the point.

He shook his head and put on a smile for her. "Look, it's pretty much finished. Just needs to finish drying and bake it, then I'll keep it in my room."

Her wide brown eyes turned hard. "Why? So you can fuck it?"

"What?"

"If you keep that thing, you won't spend any time with _real_ people. People who care about you and want you to do well." She clasped his hand in both of hers.

This was odd. Was she confessing to him? Or was she simply being a 'good friend', like always. Her hands were so soft and gentle...like water—those soothing waters. And _her_.

Stars dotted the sky, nowhere near as brilliant as what he'd experienced. Then again, that was a whole other realm. He closed his eyes and substituted the city's night for one where you could practically touch the astral bodies from the peak of mountain tops. And _her_ with her sturdy arms around him. She should have an _amazing_ name like that cosmos. Maybe Celeste—no that was kind of common. Astral... Astrally... _Astreya_.

"Hello?"

He opened his eyes, his hand no longer being held. Marci's face was scrunched up as she stared at him.

"Huh?" he said.

"You were mumbling."

_Astreya_. That was perfect! He grinned to himself.

"God, you're so out of it." She shook her head and left him there to be with the stars.

~

"Do you like the name?"

She—Astreya—leaned forward, eyes flashing with excitement. "It's wonderful. Thank you."

She engulfed him in her embrace, her whole body radiating like a sun-soaked stone. Her wings unfurled and fanned them, heat and cool air mingling around their entwined bodies. He sighed happily, resting his head against her shoulder. This was heaven.

"Wouldn't mind staying like this," he whispered.

"But why, when it can be more. I can come into—"

A loud noise broke through, shattered the world.

He lurched out of bed, covered in sweat. What the hell? What was that? After a moment, he listened for it again. It'd sounded like something breaking...oh no! He raced out of the room and down the steps.

There on the kitchen tile was Astreya. In pieces.

Marci stood there unapologetically with a hammer in her hands.

He got down on his knees, started picking up the fragments. "Dammit, _why_?"

"I had to." Tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Ever since you started that thing—"

" _Her name_ is Astreya."

The hammer clattered to the floor. "Oh my God. It's a fucking pile of clay!"

"No. No..." He shook his head as each piece he held crumbled. "She wasn't."

"I'm going to call a shrink for you."

All that work, all that effort to bring her forth, to give her life. Gone. Wasted. Like his heart.

He collected the broken Astreya in silence, his only source of light coming from the hallway.

~

The day went by in a blur—and good thing; he didn't want to deal with _anyone_. Especially Marci. He had a right mind to move out and leave her with the high electricity bill.

But instead he lay in bed all evening long, tired—but not sleepy tired. Even if he did sleep, he wouldn't dream of Astreya, star-filled nights, or cool blue lakes. That was gone, thrown into the Dumpster in a million pieces.

He rolled over, tossed the pillow that smelled of Marci, rolled over again.

Just when his eyelids began to droop, a sound—much like wings unfurling—came from Marci's bedroom.

Her door was wide open as he entered, the room pitch dark except for a night light in the socket. The deck door was also open.

There stood an enigmatic figure; its wings spread and quivered, arms raised as though calling to the heavens.

Astreya?

The figure spotted him. In place of eyes, novae burned in its sockets.

It came forward.

He stumbled into the wall, light switches poking him in the back.

He flipped the switch.

"Ow, bright," Marci said, shielding her eyes.

"Marci?" The word fell out of his open mouth.

"Of course it's me. Who else?"

"I...I dunno."

She smiled. Not the slight one, no. It was gorgeous—brightening her face and...the briefest of flickers, like lightning, in her eyes.

She took his arm. "Come, let's go to bed."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Siobhan Gallagher is a graduate from ASU and wannabe zombie slayer, currently residing in Arizona. Her fiction has appeared in in Lovecraft eZine, COSMOS Online and Unidentified Funny Objects anthology. Occasionally, she does this weird thing called 'blogging' at: defconcanwrite.blogspot.com

#   

#  Cognitive Terminal Velocity

# By Adam C. Richardson

# Art By: Laura Givens

Jeeves, disable all system safeties and increase cognitive processing speed to the absolute maximum.

Sir, disabling safety protocols is extremely dangerous and may result in permanent brain damage.

Just do it, dammit!

Disabling safety protocols now. Cognitive processing accelerated to maximum.

Oh...ouch! OW!

Sir...? Sir...? As I have stated, tampering with the safety settings of your subcranial interface is a violation...

Jeeves, shut up. This is perfect. How fast can I think now?

Approximately twenty-one times faster than cognitive nominal. Sir, I am having difficulty interpreting your sensory data. Are we falling?

We are. Jeeves, I want to send a Tweet.

Go ahead, sir.

Say this: "I have just been pushed from the observation deck of Windsor Tower."

Is that all sir?

No. Add this: "Will keep posting on developments." End of message.

Tweet sent, sir.

Thank you, Jeeves.

Are we really falling, sir?

You've got access to my eyes. See for yourself. There goes the 98th floor. That was the marketing vice-president's office. Was that his secretary in his lap?

Yes, sir.

There goes floor 95. We're speeding up. Jeeves, how much time do we have before we hit the ground?

Based on your observations and a given acceleration of 9.81 meters per second per second—

You don't have to impress me, Jeeves. Just tell me the answer.

7.2 seconds as of...now.

So we've got some time. We need to figure out a way to survive this. Do you have any suggestions?

Processing...

What would be nice is if there was a truck full of pillows driving around down there...

Would sir be interested in a SomaDown pillow? It has been rated the most comfortable by three independent consumer digests and—

Any pillow would be fine, Jeeves. I just need a soft landing.

I do not believe there are any trucks full of pillows in the vicinity, sir.

Well, I'm staring straight down. Can you see anything that might provide a soft landing?

No, sir.

What about the fountain in the square?

That is thirty meters to the southwest and has only twenty-five centimeters of water.

Could we make that work?

No, sir.

...

We're not going to survive, are we?

No, sir.

...

Sir, may I recommend a song? Perhaps something by AC/DC would be appropriate under the circumstances.

Who would do this to me, Jeeves?

Sir?

Somebody sent an email telling me to go up to the observation deck. They're certainly the same person who pushed me. Can you trace the email to its source?

I'm afraid it is untraceable, sir.

Who would want to push me off a building?

Do you want to review your enemies list?

I have an enemies list?

You downloaded an interpersonal security app to your subcranial interface last year in July.

Did I?

It's a free demo. It records all of your communications with colleagues and acquaintance, identifying keywords and micro-expressions that may indicate a hostile disposition towards your person.

So you can tell me who would want me dead?

I can give you the data, sir.

Quickly, Jeeves. That was the sixty-first floor we just passed.

At the top of the list is Mary Weathers.

Mary? Why?

For a full analysis of the data, you will need to purchase the full version of the app. It's $14.95.

Oh, good grief! Buy it.

Processing...

Mary? From Accounting? Why would Mary... Ow! This speed-thinking is burning a hole in my brain.

Does sir wish for me to reengage the safety protocols?

No. Do we have the app yet?

The transaction is being processed.

Well, finish already.

Transaction complete. Mary Weathers began showing signs of aggression towards you after the company Christmas party. There have been over 300 facial micro-expressions recorded of contempt, anger and scorn. Do you wish to review the visuals?

No.

Her dialog with you has been peppered with an abnormally high frequency of the use of the words "cut," "slash," "dismember," "un-man"...

Did I do something at the Christmas party I don't remember? I was drunk most of the time.

You called her a "boring, ineffectual cow," sir.

To her face?

You were speaking to another colleague. She stood 1.2 meters away at the time.

...No. Mary couldn't have done this to me. The hands that pushed me...big hands—someone tall. Limit the list to people who are taller than me.

Kyle Larsen is next on the list.

Kyle? Really?

Mr. Larsen fits the physical profile...

Hang on. We're passing the thirty-second floor. Can you see his cubicle through the window from here?

Mr. Larsen does not appear to be in his cubicle.

Why would he want me dead? I mean, besides the fact that I got his promotion...and his girlfriend...and I constantly raid his candy dish when he's not around.

As I recall, he caught you taking the last of his Jolly Ranchers just this morning.

Jeeves, do you think he killed me over a Jolly Rancher?

I don't know, sir.

...

Sir?

The ground is awfully close now. Is there any way I can avoid hitting that hotdog stand?

No sir.

This is going to be messy.

Yes sir.

I'll never know if Kyle really did this. The fact that he's not at his cubicle is pretty weak evidence.

It is, sir.

The cops can sort it out I guess. Jeeves, compose an email to the police. Attach a time-stamped still shot of my view of Kyle's cubicle, along with a transcript of our conversation since I was pushed and all data you have from the interpersonal security app. Give it a subject "Evidence for my murder investigation." Send it.

Done, sir.

Now send an email to Mary. Say this: "I'm sorry I was a jerk at the Christmas party. I was drunk. You're not ineffectual, and to be honest, I always thought you were kind of hot." End of message.

Message sent, sir. Is that true, sir?

Of course not, Jeeves, but I could use the karma right now. Now send a Tweet that says "Kyle Larsen is a whiny prick who would kill a guy over a Jolly Rancher." End of message.

Message sent, sir. What about your karma, sir?

You win some, you lose some.

We are close to the ground. Would sir prefer to be unconscious?

No, Jeeves. I want to be wide awake for this. It only happens once, after all.

Yes, sir.

I'm ready for that AC/DC now. I think I'd like to hear Back in Black...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Adam Richardson makes his money as a software engineer. He lives in the Minnesota outback with his wife, three daughters, and one cantankerous cat.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Laura Givens is a Denver Based artist and author. Her art has graced the covers of numerous publishers' books and magazines. She has provided story illustrations for _Orson_ _Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Jim Baen's Universe, Talebones, Science Fiction Trails and Tales of the Talisman,_ among others. Her work may be viewed at www.lauragivens-artist.com . In 2010 she naively decided she could probably write stories as good as many she had illustrated. She has sold tales ranging from zombie stories to space operas. She was co-editor and contributor to _Six-Guns Straight From Hell_ , a weird western anthology, and is art director for _Tales of the Talisman_ magazine.

#  Slaying Dragons

# By Brent Knowles

The grinding squeal of the estate's doors startled Taloma, waking the snoring dragon on her bed.

"Will the servants ever learn?" Taloma muttered as she swirled away from the polished metal mirror where she had been preparing herself for night. The double doors were to be used only during the day! Guests who came late always entered via the side entrance.

The dragon dropped his head back onto her sheets as Taloma stomped out of the room, slamming her door behind her. She leaned against the banister and looked down at the lower floor. The draft that the four unexpected visitors had allowed in was chill and bris; the fireplace along the opposite wall, its massive chimney rising to and through the vaulted ceiling, sputtered, at war with the voracious and intrusive wind. Two maids scurried to close the doors.

She recognized the leader of the intruders. Rallag was a broad shouldered, blond-haired, serf-crushing noble, a little overweight for her liking but not unattractive. His armor was battered, and that worried her because she had never seen the man in public without it pristine. The rest of his vanguard looked no better. A warrior woman with matted, bloodied hair and a permanent wince leaned against the wall, smudging the fine tapestry behind her, and two weary pikemen stayed near the doors, leaning on their weapons.

"Rallag of Eastgrove," Taloma called, her smile broad and inviting for her guards had yet to arrive. "The night is late. I can only offer you warm greetings, this spiteful fall being what it is."

"I come not for lodging, food, or—" Rallag paused, his deep voice echoing throughout the entry chamber and resonating in the wood banister beneath her palms, "your hospitality. I come for the Ear of the Council."

The Ear is it now? She had been called worse. She wet her lips and strode towards the top of the staircase. "And what news do you bring?"

"The Takers have crossed the Line."

"Indeed!" Taloma feigned surprise.

Rallag nodded. "The fighting was intense." A dark shadow fell across his face. Sorrow? He fixed his eyes to her and his melancholy melted into disgust. "I would have assumed that she with her head pressed against the chests of our Councilmen would already know this."

It had been years since she had taken a lover from the Council but gossip was as gossip was. Angered, she braved the walk down the remaining stairs.

"I had not heard any news. I am sorry."

With the Takers breaking through the weakened Line the other vanguards would have been pushed back. Farms and logging camps along the river would have been raided as they had often been before the line of walls and forts had been built to separate the kingdom from the wild lands.

"The Council's decision to weaken us, to pull soldiers from the Line, has cost us several towns."

Greed-drunk beasts. She forced her mouth to assume the idiotic expression of the surprised noblewoman. After all she had been instrumental in making the Council decide to take troops from the Line and move them south.

"As long as Norrten stands—"

"Norrten has fallen too."

Her eyes widened and she shivered and this time it was not from the unwelcome cold. The Line, a hundred garrisoned outposts anchored and supported by Norrten, held the Kingdom's northeast border. With that city-fort fallen, all the southern villages were vulnerable.

She had not agreed to this!

"I will bring your concerns to the Council."

The large man strode to within sword's swing of her. The blade strapped across his back was no idle weapon—a haft of bone rose past his head, the arm bone of a Taker.

"Make the Council act. Pull the southern garrisons. Fortify the Line!"

"I will do what I can."

"You know perfectly well what you can do," he said, at least having the decency to lower his voice to a harsh whisper so that what words flew did so between only the two of them. "You have never lost a Council motion. And that fool son of yours has never lost a caravan."

She winced. He knew much. Maybe too much.

"This audience is over." She turned, hoping to push him away with the swirl of her gown.

"Do you understand what is at stake?"

She ignored him.

"They've Taken children!"

She did not look back. She couldn't, not with warm tears streaming down her face. This time, the Takers had taken too much.

~

"You promised," she hissed to the dragon on her bed, and it hissed back, its forked tongue snaking out, warm briny spittle staining her gown. It rose up on its brown legs, the golden gleam of its youth lost like the shine of Rallag's armor.

The Takers had advanced too far.

Even her own city was vulnerable now, a jeweled sprawl of districts that she might have looked out upon through the keyhole window above her bed if the shutters were open. Which they were not. The dragon hated the cold, and since it could not fly, the shutters were rarely open.

They relied on the Line. Not only were the farmers, loggers, and gold panners that had created the riverside villages vital to the Kingdom, but the inner cities, like her own, had few fortifications.

Rallag's words bothered her, his insinuations stinging. A hurt she had thought herself insulated against. At one time yes, she had done whatever the dragon told her to do to survive. Now things were different. The dragon made fewer demands with each passing year.

She picked up a triangle of parchment, dipped a quill, and placed them on the floor in front of the fire. Then she kicked the bed. The dragon glared at her with pink, angry eyes before jumping off and scuttling towards the smoldering fire, its scales playing an off-kilter dirge as they rubbed one another. She'd have to oil them soon, else the maids might start asking about the strange noises coming from her bedchambers.

The dragon settled itself in front of the fireplace and took the quill between thumb-claw and talon.

I am only the go-between. Your anger is with the Takers. A few more peasants die, who cares?

"Remember I was once a peasant," she said. The Takers were barbarians, but most scholars insisted that they were not of human origin, that despite how human-like the Takers seemed to be beneath the animal skins they wore, they were mere beasts. It did not matter. They were the enemy but not her enemy. The dragon worked for them and he owned her.

"You convinced me that the Takers were starving and that this was a raid of necessity. Not an expansion."

I did.

Guileless blue eyes stared back at her, unblinking and moist. The world's smallest conman. She hated how he changed his eye color to suit his whims. "You are impossible."

I am.

She could not smile while thinking of the Taken children. Instead she glared and settled herself into the chair set beside the fireplace. The black leather was warm, and she toyed with one of the polished metal studs that ran the length of the chair's arm. She studied the dragon. Not her dragon. Just the dragon. He had never proposed a name and had rebuked the ones she had offered.

"The Council will send reinforcements and push the Takers back."

No, they will not. You will not allow it. Dorian's caravan has still not cleared the Line.

She bit her lip. The early snowfall in the mountains had delayed her son. The timing of this was beyond perfection. The dragon's doing.

"Get out of here," she whispered. There were three ways into Taloma's bedroom: the main door, a private hallway leading from a waiting room, and the dragon's door. The dragon crawled into the fireplace.

"May the Four Fathers watch over you, Dorian," she whispered. The only child the dragon had ever permitted her to keep, that single generosity binding her to it and the Takers forever.

~

Across the river from the dockside brothel, she stared at the domed roof of the Council Hall, a globule of gray beneath overcast skies. The river cut through the city with docks on either side of it and a sprawling maze of warehouses, markets, and whorehouses erupting outwards until the city proper contained their expansion.

Still the Hall, though far away, loomed over her as if watching her departure in silent judgment of what she had done. What she had said before sneaking out of Council.

"We are told that our city Sarphon is exposed," she had said to the other councilors ringed around the stone table, "and now we will send what few soldiers our city has away? Leaving us further compromised?"

She liked to think it was her words that had shamed the men into voting with her, but she knew as well as any that it was fear of her exposing deeds from their pasts. All part of the dragon's plan. She pitied them, they but tokens in his game too.

Today dragon, I change your rules.

She stepped out from the brothel, exchanging nods with the mistress of the house who sat on the front step. Upstairs, Taloma had left jewels—her payment for the robes, the makeup, and the dye that dulled her hair.

If the people realized who she was, she would be mobbed; they loved her. Loved that she had once been one of them.

She scanned the heraldry flying from the signal masts of the riverboats pointed northward until she found the one she sought. A staff on green. By the time she reached Rallag's riverboat, his crew had already boarded.

Had the Council come to a different conclusion, she doubted Rallag's exhausted vanguard would have been embarking again with such haste, raw recruits filling in for dead warriors and a rowing crew comprised of prisoners pressed into service. In her lifetime, the vanguards had diminished. Once they had expanded the Kingdom's borders, but now they merely defended them.

The archer on watch shouted when he saw her, and Rallag emerged from the cargo cabin set in the middle of the riverboat. She hoped her hood, the painted scars covering her face, and her cropped and yellow-dyed hair would suffice to keep her identity secret.

Rallag was a second-son, guaranteed only a small stipend from the lands his brother had inherited, and forced to make his own way in the world, ultimately to secure his own estate. Many like him led vanguards. He seemed sadder somehow, letting the railing support his weight, as if the betrayal of the Council had taken a toll on him.

"They told me no Healer was willing," he said.

"I am. Willing."

Rallag nodded his consent, and she looked from face to face as she boarded, her bare feet chilled by the wood beneath her. She could not understand why they followed Rallag to their deaths, but she shrugged her concerns away. They only had to live long enough to reunite her with Dorian.

~

The crew rowed hard, clearing the city's boundaries before afternoon spread into evening. Taloma leaned against the outside wall of the cabin and watched the shoreline move away from her, closing her eyes and remembering the dusty road that paralleled the river. She had ridden it with her husband Julin when he had brought her here from Norrten, she barely a woman despite her years of service.

Living with Julin in the manor she still owned had been bliss until he had been nominated to Council, only to lose the election. Ten bitter years followed before he had finally blessed her with his death.

She opened her eyes to reveal a flat, treeless rise overlooking the river and the road that was now hidden behind it. Seven bodies dangled from scaffolds on the hill. Seven children.

She knew this happened to the Taken, but she had never seen it before.

"The Council has failed." The voice startled her and she looked up, her hood slipping free. She tugged it back into place quickly, but Rallag's eyes were focused on the dead.

"They let them be Taken and then they hang them. That is not justice. That is failure."

He turned and climbed the wooden ladder to resume watch atop the cargo cabin. Taloma could not reconcile this man with the noble she remembered. Bluster, boldness, all of it was gone.

She would not let his mood sour hers. She was proud of herself for the first time since winning her own Council seat. She was free of the dragon. No more threats. No more manipulation.

~

The grunts of the rowers were no match for the loud crash as the boat rose and fell against the rushing waters. From here, at the front of the boat, she could not see the Line itself. The forts, towns, and mines hidden behind the rolling hills and leaf-shed forests, but the Line was marked by the mountains spreading east and west, a visible border to the Kingdom.

She planned to part ways with Rallag in a few days, once they reached Baazan village. From there, she would set out on foot to search the mountains for Dorian. There had been no sign of Takers yet, and the villages they passed had been untouched by war, though a steady flow of villagers, with their possessions on carts or hauled on broad shoulders, were moving south towards Sarphon. She worried over the reception their children might receive once they arrived.

No one really understood what happened to the Taken, only that they returned changed. Few parents ever noticed that their children had grown quieter, more watchful. Only when it was too late and windows were being unbarred in the middle of the night, or worse, a fort's portcullis opened, did they understand. Fewer parents lived long enough to find that the Taken never grew again; they were stuck at the age at which they had been abducted.

Among the orphans of Norrten she had seen several Taken. Mostly she avoided them, but after the dragon found her, she had often passed messages to them and watched them disappear into the tundra. None were ever allowed back in, not even if they proved themselves free of their curse by growing into adults as her Dorian had.

A loud swoosh filled the air, and she flinched, but it was only the archer. He was leaning over the rail, between the rowers, and had fired his bow into the water. He must have hit something, for he whooped loudly and reeled in the line that had been attached to the arrow, dragging a large, flopping, fish aboard.

She watched the crew help the archer with his catch. The fish bucked and squirmed, and the grim warriors and rowers laughed as they chased it around the deck.

~

"Narrows!"

A canopy of gray and brown branches arched over the river, their leaves fallen weeks previous. The archer's shouts roused idle warriors, and under Rallag's direction, they took up positions before the boat slid under the tree branches. Ahead, the banks of the river narrowed, as if desiring to be reunited.

An ideal spot for an ambush.

Branches screeched as they bent along the hull sides, snapping free as the boat moved past. The two forests touched above and obscured the sun. This would be a beautiful spot, she decided, if this journey were taken in summer when lush green leaves filled the canopies. She could imagine those colors easily because she had several gowns in such tones.

A rock fell onto the deck at her feet.

Nobody else noticed it, so she scooped up the piece of purple shale. White letters were scraped into the soft surface.

Ungrateful bitch.

She threw the rock overboard. Glancing up, she could not see the dragon's shadow. Taloma might have asked herself how it had found her but that would be like guessing how it had known to single her out from all the other orphans decades ago.

"I won't be used no more," she whispered, wishing that the girl she once had been had never followed the trail of dropped stones—the letters mere squiggles to her then but no less alluring. Out of the narrow alley where she had scrounged for food, and all the way into the Walker's Garden, she had found trail's end beneath a sturdy cedar, a dragon resting in its boughs.

His eyes had been a sparkling blue, their mischievous gleam the perfect enticement for a lonely girl. A wiser child might have taken the stones and cracked his skull to sell him or eat him. But not her. She was not wise back then.

"Help us!"

She jerked. A boy's voice, followed by that of a girl.

Taloma looked around. Another dragon trick? There were two pale, thin, children standing knee deep in the water, arms reaching for the boat.

"Archer!" Rallag shouted, "Stop them from boarding."

"I can't do that!"

Rallag stomped over and took the bow himself.

"Don't shoot them!" Taloma screamed, but Rallag ignored her and shot both children, their bodies tumbling into the river. Rallag turned on her, close enough that she smelled the onion he had eaten earlier.

"They were Taken," he said.

"How could you know?"

Her voice was louder than she intended and most of the crew watched her. She almost touched her face, as if needing to check if her makeup still told a story, lettered by false scars, or if they had faded enough that Rallag saw the truth beneath the illusion.

Rallag shook his head and then withdrew to the cabin while Taloma turned, needing to look forward, to not think about the dead children behind them. The woman warrior approached her, and Taloma realized she did not know her name, or the name of any of the crew. She had not bothered to ask.

"His wife and baby were killed when Norrten fell. His two older daughters Taken."

~

Though the river had widened, an unearthly stillness clung to the crew as they moved deeper into the Taker's freshly claimed territory. Yesterday they had seen their first corpse floating in the water, and now a constant stream of the bloated dead flowed past. Taloma flinched every time the boat rolled over top of one.

She regretted throwing the dragon's rock overboard. It had been a tangible reminder of why she was heading into danger instead of away from it. Dorian. She had nothing else to remind her of him, their few meetings always awkward, held outside the city, he waiting while his caravan did business inside. The long scars cut into his face as a child forever barred him entry but also kept archers from doing what Rallag had done to the children.

Taloma still remembered the dread she had felt upon entering the manor and finding only servants and a sleeping dragon. Two days later the dragon had discovered Dorian in a forest outside town. There had been no sign that he had been Taken but he was branded and exiled anyways. She had been forced to watch her twelve-year-old son leave to begin his apprenticeship with a caravan.

Dorian was a master now, though her money more than his good sense had influenced that. The mountains ahead were large, with white-capped peaks, and she shivered, thinking of Dorian working his way down from the ledges. He did not know what his mother did for him, how she kept him safe, and though he was foolish, he did care for his caravan and would do his utmost to avoid Taker territory.

A rock struck her. It was a pebble and barely stung, but several more fell, bouncing off the crew, specifically the tillmen, who, while trying to protect themselves, caused the boat to steer towards shore. The dragon appeared in the trees overhead, not trying to hide itself.

She hated the beast.

It had used her for most of her life, had made her degrade herself to please it. It was dangling above her, mocking her with its very presence. Impulsively she shouted at the archer to shoot it and he responded so swiftly that in the next moment the dragon fell, splashing into the river.

Taloma was stunned. It was over. The dragon was dead!

But then she heard it shriek, sputtering, as the archer pulled it to the surface. He had used his fishing bow and now, with help from two rowers, he hauled the dragon to the deck.

~

"Smaller than I expected," Rallag said, following Taloma into the cabin where the crew had imprisoned the wounded dragon. There was a small crowd behind them, everyone eager for a look. Small strips of light stole into the room from several thin, rectangular windows.

The dragon would never glide again, the wing was ruined, but its chest rose and fell at regular intervals.

"I need privacy," she said.

Rallag barked an order, and when the cabin cleared, she closed the door and all the storm shutters. The boat was old, and the wood had shifted and buckled in many places so that enough light entered for her to examine the dragon. She did not know how to bandage the wing, and the bleeding had stopped, so she simply cleaned it. It started to wake beneath her touch, its legs twitching, tugging at the length of rope tying its rear feet together and binding it to a rusty metal ring embedded in the floor.

When its black eyes opened the dragon moaned mournfully.

"Don't start," she said, "This is your fault. Not mine." It didn't even hiss in protest, slumping instead and stretching out a claw, scratching letters into the wooden floorboard.

We can save him.

She bit her lip. "How?"

Off the boat. Now.

She shook her head.

It crooned weakly. Remember how I used to sing for you?

She shook her head again, but she did remember. The dragon had been sweet at first, stealing fruits from noble houses and dropping them into her lap, the two of them eating in gardens forbidden to them, the dragon always singing a soft, soothing song.

The dragon's eyes closed, and she touched its forehead, her fingertips sliding against dull scales, its purr resonating through the wood beneath her. It had shown her how to read and write, had escorted her through the streets of Norrten; not an elegant city like Sarphon but with enough delights for a growing, learning child.

Those were the pleasant years, but eventually the dragon found a woman willing to sponsor Taloma into a brothel. The childish joy of being the only little girl with a pet dragon ended the first time she had led a stranger into her room.

The boat shuddered, a deep reverberation followed by the harsh cracking of wood. The dragon woke, pink eyes staring at her with concern as Taloma raced to the doorway. The river was narrow again with naked trees looming from both banks, their branches touching overhead.

Takers stood on the shore, launching bone grapples attached to black ropes. The boat shuddered from dozens of impacts. The rowers roared, their muscles bunching as they pulled at their oars and tried to free the boat, while Rallag and his warriors chopped at the grapple lines. Arrows flew overhead as the archer took down the frontlines of the Takers.

Nevertheless, the boat crept closer and closer to the shore.

Taloma froze with fear, watching the skin-wrapped forms, so tall that they hunched over from their own weight, reaching with long arms towards the boat. Rallag roared and slammed his sword down on the first would-be boarder as the rowers stopped rowing to focus on pulling the grapples away. Taloma joined them, taking up a blade to help cut the ropes, and only when the final grappling rope was severed did the boat slide backwards, the rowers resuming their posts.

"Forward!" Rallag bellowed. The deck was clear of enemies, the river banks widening, the Takers receding from view. In minutes they were down river from the ambush. Of his vanguard, only Rallag and the archer survived. He screamed at the rowers to push forward but they ignored him and Taloma watched as the warrior stormed past her and into the cabin to drag the startled dragon out. Rallag then pulled the bindings of his armor free, the pieces falling to the deck.

When he jumped into the river, dragon and all, Taloma did not hesitate. She followed him.

~

She dragged the dragon after them, the rope now wrapped about its neck. Taloma kept it moving with whispered threats and the occasional nudge of her foot. Its scales rattled loudly, but there was nothing they could do about that as they cut inland. When the day gave way to night they stopped but built no campfire. Rallag simply settled his back against a tree and collapsed.

"Healer, come here," he said, and though Taloma wanted to tend to her sore, bare feet, she did as he bid after tying the dragon's rope to a tree.

She opened Rallag's leather tunic and saw a thin cut across his torso that had already partly closed itself. Greenish yellow fluid oozed from it. Not knowing what to do she dabbed at the mess with a cloth.

When she looked up he was studying her face, his brow furrowed, and then he grabbed her wrist, pulling her forward hard enough that her knees scraped against ground. He tore her hood away.

"It is you!" he said, shoving her backwards. She fell and scattered dry leaves. He loomed over her. "I wondered why a healer seemed as determined as I to continue north."

"For my son," she whispered.

"You did this! You put your son above the lives of... so many!" Rallag pulled the sword free and let it fall to his side. She scrambled backwards.

She said, "I am his mother and I did what was necessary."

"You moved the soldiers from Norrten, the other forts."

Taloma nodded.

"I knew that the beast was important," he whispered. "Might it lead me to my daughters?"

"I don't know."

"Ask it!"

~

"Where is my son?" Taloma whispered to the dragon as Rallag slept a restless slumber.

I sent him into the passes. I can lead you to him or to the warrior's daughters. You cannot save both, Tal. The dragon was pleased with itself, eyes twinkling blue under the waning moon.

Tal. A child's name. She glanced at Rallag. How carelessly his clothing hung on him, the dirt and blood that covered him giving him no pause, no shame. Would Rallag ever shine his armor again or wear it proudly?

"I am not a bad person," she whispered. Why hadn't she fled the city with Dorian? I was scared, she thought, scared of going back to that life. She could not be scared now. She had to do the right thing.

Taloma told the dragon what she wanted to do and watched as its eyes changed to a milky mauve that she had never seen before.

~

The dragon led them through deserted streets, Taloma recognizing many of the burnt and burning buildings, some she had ran past as a child with loaves of stolen bread tucked under arm, others with their overhangs that kept begging children dry in all but the worst of storms. They walked for hours but they were blessed in that she never had to see again the brothel where she had traded her innocence for security.

My fault. Not the dragon's. Today she made amends, sacrificing her son so that Rallag's daughters would live. It had to be this way.

The dragon ranged ahead, returning only to warn them of Taker patrols, they adjusting their course but always heading towards the docks, where the dragon said the children were kept.

"I don't trust it," Rallag said as they watched the dragon's tail disappear around a corner.

"Does it matter?" Her eyes looked past Rallag, past the city and into the mountains. "You are already willing to die for them." He followed her gaze and said nothing more.

The dragon returned, snapping its head to the right, and they followed. The river's growl was louder and eventually the creature stopped, gesturing across an empty thoroughfare towards a warehouse. It was the only building along the strip that had not been destroyed. Its wooden door was closed.

When she looked back at the dragon, it was gone.

"Coward," Rallag muttered. The warrior pulled free his sword and strode towards the warehouse. Taloma started to follow but her toe caught on a brown rock. She retrieved it, deciphering the words but not understanding their meaning.

~

Almost thirty children dangled from the warehouse's rafters. They were gagged and wrapped in thin skins so that they were completely enclosed, the only signs of life the occasional twitch rippling the surface of their prison or a muffled whimper.

There were three Takers.

The battle on the boat had happened quickly, giving her no time to study them, but in that instant as she rushed after Rallag, reaching his side as he pulled the door open, she saw them for what they were.

Almost human. But terror resided in that almost. Their arms were too long and their legs crooked and backwards bent. Beards erupted from misshapen faces into and through the mountains of rippling hides they wore. They seemed awkward, like poorly made toys, savage beasts teetering for balance, but when they turned towards their intruders that weakness vanished.

Rallag shoved her roughly to the floor, saving her from the blade that whirled past, so it grazed her left bicep instead of decapitating her. By the time she pulled herself to a stand, using a post for support, Rallag was finishing a slash that tore open a Taker's chest, a killing blow. Children screamed, their cocoons twitching, as the remaining Takers moved to encircle Rallag, both wielding long, blade-topped staffs.

Rallag was skilled and moved swiftly though defensively, adjusting his position constantly and preventing the Takers from flanking him. His enemies were no less skilled, squealing and swinging their weapons slowly, conserving their energy, waiting for Rallag to make a mistake. The three moved through the hanging bodies, setting the cocoons to rocking and forcing more whimpers from the children.

The crescent of bone that had wounded her still lay at her feet, and Taloma reached for it with her good arm, cringing as she touched a sinew wrapped hilt, the bone blade itself smudged from a lifetime of use.

Rallag was tiring, and the blade she had picked up, the blade she did not know how to use, was heavy. She might run instead. Might find the dragon, force him to help her save Dorian.

A tap from a staff caught Rallag above the knee and he almost stumbled, using his blade as a makeshift crutch to keep upright as he stepped back to avoid a followup blow. The other Taker slipped behind him.

Once flanked, Rallag would die.

Her fault.

She screamed, hoping to distract one, her voice the only weapon she could wield. Neither Taker turned to look at her, and this made her tremble in anger. They had used her and her son for years, and now they ignored her! She was nothing to them.

She had no choice.

She charged.

The Taker shifted, his shell of hides cavorting, his face sucked into them and then out the other side, facing her without moving. But her charge was enough of a distraction, and Rallag took his advantage, decapitating the other Taker and then spinning to run her foe through before it attacked her.

As quickly as it began, their battle was ended.

~

The next day she was in a daze, her feet numb and her left arm bound against her chest as a flock of children followed her and Rallag across the hills. She had feared Rallag meant to kill them, to kill all the Taken, but the warrior had changed too, it seemed. Though Rallag showed no favoritism to his daughters and had insisted that they comfort and carry the smaller children, he watched them often, smiling when he thought nobody was watching him.

They were just past where the riverboat had been attacked when they saw the dragon. One moment the sky was clear, the sun bright, and then a long shadow fell over them, a massive black blot covering the sun.

"By the Four Fathers, now that's a dragon," Rallag muttered. As they watched, it became a tiny speck, turning back towards the north and with a shrug he resumed their march.

But Taloma hesitated.

She had always thought her dragon the only dragon and that it had been small because that was the way all dragons were. She had been wrong. This beast disappearing on the horizon was huge, and she sucked in her breath, realizing. Her dragon had been Taken. Locked in child's form and used. The writing she had read on its last stone message now made sense.

She watched the adult dragon fly north until it was a tiny dot on the horizon. That was when she noticed the black shapes moving swiftly towards them, from the mountains. She rushed to Rallag's side.

"Takers?" she asked, and he nodded grimly.

"Lead the children on. I'll delay them as much as I am able."

She nodded and rushed away even as the pursuers cried out after them. At first she ignored them, urging the children forward instead, but then she stopped. She recognized the voice.

Dorian? She peered intently and realized it was him and his caravan. Not Takers! Her son's black hair half covered his face in the way she hated, and he ran with a slight limp, but he and his men seemed well. Their mules staggered to a weary stop as the caravan reached them, and Taloma rushed past Rallag to greet her son.

There were hugs and words as Dorian rambled on, talking excitedly as he led her to the middle of the caravan. Rallag followed them, stopping with her when Dorian pulled a basket from a mule.

"He came for us," Dorian explained, opening it. Inside was the dragon. "He led us through the passes, past the Takers. But the shakes took him, and he died before we reached the foothills."

The Takers had taken back their minion.

"You stupid thing," she whispered, pulling out the stone with the dragon's last message. She set it on the corpse.

They promised I would fly one day. I am sorry, Tal.

"Me too," she whispered and kissed her dragon's cheek.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Brent Knowles is a game designer and author. He has been published in several magazines and anthologies including Perihelion, Abyss and Apex, Neo-Opsis, On Spec and Writers of the Future. He lives in Edmonton with his wife and two sons. Online he can be found at www.brentknowles.com where he blogs regularly about game design and writing.

#  Witchdoctors and Tears

# By Jeff Bowles

#

Some witchdoctor, thought Marci. He's wearing blue jeans, for God's sake.

She and Brandon had been trying for years. On their own for a time, then with specialists, then with practitioners of...fringe medicine. Jake the witchdoctor was only the latest in a long succession of herbalists, acupuncturists, and clairvoyants. The only difference was that this time, Brandon didn't know a thing about it.

"In here," said Jake. "Pour tears into cup."

The cup was carved from an ancient tree root, or so Jake had told her. A symbol of longevity and growth, Marci supposed. She'd collected her tears in an old pill bottle. She couldn't be sure what that was a symbol of.

"Very fine," said Jake. "Very fine."

Jake the witchdoctor lived in a single-bedroom apartment. Walls painted a bland maroon, icons and symbols and knickknacks of birth and birthing and pregnant women lining his coffee table and mantel. As soon as Marci poured the tears into the cup, Jake pulled a cloth pouch from his pocket. He undid its string, shook it a few times, dipped his fingers in. He pulled free a solitary pearl, coated in a thin layer of brown powder.

"Now," he said, "boy or girl?"

"Does it really matter?"

"Matters a great deal. Clockwise swirl for boy. Counterclockwise for girl. Intent is everything. Beasts and birds, women and men. Baby does not care. Only momma cares. You see?"

Not really, thought Marci. Even so, she nodded.

Jake smiled and dropped the pearl into the cup. He handed it to her.

"Intent is everything," he said again. "Clockwise swirl for boy. Counterclockwise for girl. Hold your desires, keep them close, and the powers of the world will aid you."

Marci stared down into the cup. A pearl standing in a shallow pool of tears. It didn't look so magical at all, really. In fact, it looked kind of...

Childish.

She sighed. Her desires. What were her desires again? There had been the desire to have a man in her life. Brandon had made that one a reality. When he'd asked her to marry him, desire number two had been scratched off the list. But there had been more desires, hadn't there? The desire for a home, the desire to be a we instead of a he and I. Most importantly of all, there had been the desire to be a family instead of a couple. Couple. It was almost a dirty word at this point.

My desires, Marci thought. No matter what the cost, I want a family and I want it now.

She set her jaw firmly, and without another thought, swirled the pearl with her finger. Clockwise for a boy, counterclockwise for a girl. She did both. When she was done, she glanced at Jake.

"Is that it?" she said. "I don't need to drink it or anything?"

"Drink? No drink. Very well done, Mrs. Marci. Very fine."

Marci raised an eyebrow. She didn't feel strange, didn't feel haloed or enchanted, didn't feel anything other than what she had felt moments before. Even so, she smiled at Jake, handed him his fifty dollars, and left his apartment for the parking lot.

~

Negative. Of course it was negative. Marci wasn't really surprised by this. Perhaps a tad bit disappointed, but at this point, she was used to that little purple minus sign. She dropped the pregnancy test into the trash can, flushed the toilet and closed its lid.

"Well," she said softly, "even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."

Brandon was already in bed when she exited the bathroom. He sat there under the covers, reading some trashy spy novel, his back resting against the headboard. He glanced at Marci and set his glasses further down his nose.

"Well?" he said.

"No dice."

He nodded at this. Marci could easily detect the disappointment on his face, but it quickly melted away. Business as usual, yet again. He closed his book and set it on the nightstand.

"Your mother called," he said.

"Oh?"

"She said she hasn't been feeling well today. Says she's going to see the doctor tomorrow."

"Okay," said Marci. "I'll call her in the morning."

Marci sat on the edge of the bed, feeling deflated, tired, and to a lesser extent, guilty. Why hadn't she told Brandon about Jake the witchdoctor? It wasn't like he hadn't been involved in every other harebrained baby scheme she'd had.

Childish, she thought. Just childish.

She pulled off her t-shirt and crawled under the covers. After a time, she raised onto her elbows and glanced around the room. Something was missing.

"Brandon?" she said.

"Hmm?"

"Have you seen Harley?"

Harley Quinn, their Labrador/Collie mix. Marci always figured Brandon had bought her as some kind of consolation present. Sorry you're still not pregnant, and all that. Harley was a good dog, if a little disobedient. She never missed an opportunity to try to sneak under Brandon and Marci's blanket at bedtime.

Brandon pulled his glasses from his nose. He folded them up, saying, "No, I guess I haven't. I let her in when I got home, but come to think of it, I haven't seen her since."

Marci wondered at this. It occurred to her to go and look for Harley, but just as she was about to climb out of bed, Brandon rested a hand on her leg.

"I'm sure she's fine, hon. Probably just hiding in the basement or something. We'll look for her in the morning."

Marci thought about this, but after only a few moments, she nodded and turned off her bedside lamp. She fell asleep soon after her head hit the pillow.

~

Howling. The howling woke Marci up from a dead sleep. Her eyes flew open. What had she been dreaming about? Pearls and powders and tears and dogs. Dogs. She glanced at the clock. 2:36. And that howling. Where was that howling coming from?

Brandon bolted upright beside her. He'd awoken at the same moment she had.

"What is that?" said Marci.

God, it was terrible. High, wailing, like a banshee, a demon come to terrorize them in the night.

"I don't know," said Brandon. "I don't know. Stay here."

Brandon slid out of bed, went to the closet, got out his old baseball bat. Without another word, he made his way into the hall.

The howling. Marci had to bring her hands to her ears. She'd never heard anything like it. It wasn't Harley Quinn, was it? It couldn't possibly have been Harley Quinn.

Vague light suddenly filled the hallway.

"Oh my God." Brandon, out in the living room. "Marci! Marci, come quick!"

Marci sprang from bed, rushed into the hall, into the living room. Brandon knelt in the middle of the floor, the baseball bat lying beside him. Marci couldn't see around him.

She took a step.

"Brandon?" she said.

She took another step.

"Brandon, what is it?"

That's when she spotted it. Blood. Fresh blood. Darkening their white carpet, turning it into a damp, soppy sponge.

Marci raised a hand to her mouth. "Oh no."

It was Harley. Lying on her side, letting out that ungodly howl. She took a few shallow, trembling breaths, and then she howled even louder.

"What happened?" said Marci. "What happened to her?"

"Look," said Brandon.

Marci took a few more steps. The blood. The blood came from between Harley's legs. It coated her hindquarters, made her fur dark and slick. And there was something else, something small, something pulpy and...and moving. More than just one. Moving, twitching in the blood. Marci could only gasp.

When Brandon spoke, his words came out soft and slow. "She...she was pregnant."

"How?"

"I don't know."  
"But how?"

"I don't know, Marci. She can't...she shouldn't be able to..."

Brandon shook his head, clearly unable to take his eyes from those twitching, pulpy little things. Puppies. Marci forced herself to think of them as puppies and nothing else.

"Call the emergency vet, hon," said Brandon. "They're 24-hours, aren't they?"

Marci rushed to the telephone. She lifted it from its dock and glanced at the refrigerator for the vet's number.

"Something's wrong," said Brandon. "She shouldn't be howling like this."

Just as Marci put her finger to the keypad, the phone rang. She jolted, nearly dropped it to the floor. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding in her chest. It rang again.

"Marci," said Brandon.

She simply stared at him. The phone rang one last time.

"Answer it, hon."

Slowly, shakily, she pressed the talk button.

"Hello?"

"Marci? Thank God you answered."

"Dad?"

His voice. It was rushed, harried. He sounded terrified. Marci had never known her father to be terrified of anything.

"What is it, Dad?" she said. "What's wrong?"

"It's your mother. Something's wrong with her."

"Calm down, Dad. Just take a breath." Marci said this for herself as much as her father. She wondered if she sounded half as frightened as she felt.

Her father did as she asked, took a breath and then talked a little slower.

"She was in pain all yesterday. Her abdomen. I told her to take some Tylenol and turn in early, but I never thought..."

"Thought what, Dad? What happened to her?"

"She woke up screaming. The bed was covered in blood. She was bleeding. Bleeding from her...from her..."

Marci didn't need to hear the rest. Her eyes locked onto Brandon's. She shook her head slowly. It wasn't possible. It just wasn't possible.

~

They'd made plans quickly. Brandon would take Harley Quinn to the emergency vet, while Marci would rush to the hospital. Her father had called 911. Thank God he'd called 911.

Marci handed her keys to the valet just after 3:00 AM and made her way to the information desk as quickly as she could. A nice-looking young orderly led her to her mother's room. When Marci entered, her father quickly got to his feet and moved to hug her.

"She's all right," he said. "They sedated her, knocked out the pain."

Marci scanned the room over her father's shoulder. There was no hospital bed; her mother was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is she, Dad?"

Her father pulled away from her and let out a deep, careworn sigh. "They're running some tests. They said it wouldn't be long. She'll be all right. Everything will be all right."

Everything will be all right. Marci found she wasn't nearly as hopeful as her father. The way Harley had howled, the pain the poor thing had been in.

Mom. What about Mom?

Marci took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and did her best to ignore the tension in her muscles. The door opened behind her. In stepped a woman Marci assumed to be her mother's doctor. Tall, greying at the temples, sharp eyes. Marci imagined those sharp eyes only barely concealed deep astonishment and shock. When the doctor spoke, her voice betrayed no hint of either.

"Mr. Defranco," she said, "how old did you say your wife is again?"

Marci's father shook his head. "Seventy-one. Why?"

The doctor looked down at the chart in her hand. "I'm not sure how to tell you this, Mr. Defranco. Your wife...she...she's just had a..."

Suddenly, Marci's cell phone let out a long, sustained bleep. She jolted, smiled nervously at both the doctor and her father. Slowly, trembling, Marci reached into her pocket and pulled out the phone. A text message. Someone had sent her a text message. Try as she might, she couldn't recognize the number.

You wanted a family, read the text. No matter what the cost. Warned you. Beasts, birds, women, men. Intent is everything. Your dog is dead.

Marci glanced at her father. Her mouth hung open, her breath catching in her throat.

Your dog is dead. The words spun and twisted in her mind. Your dog is dead.

Another loud bleep sounded from her phone. Only this time, somehow, Marci expected it. She raised it, read it. She stared at it long enough that her father took her by the hand and pressed in close.

"Who is it, Marci?" he said softly.

Beasts, birds, women, men. Men.

Couldn't save Harley, read the text. I'm in trouble, hon. On my way to hospital. I'm bleeding. I'm bleeding so bad.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jeff Bowles is a technical writer by day and a writer of just about everything else by night. He lives with his one dog, his one wife, and his six cats out on the Eastern Plains of Colorado.

# Good Deeds in a Weary World

# By Rebecca Roland

# Cover Art By: Luke Spooner

Guy expected to come back from Spring Break in Mexico with some shot glasses, a residual hangover, and maybe a tattoo. What he hadn't expected was to be sent home to Seattle in a coffin.

He ran through the funeral home's double doors and into the night. A white hearse waited in front of him, parked beneath a portico. Cool air brushed against his cheeks, filled with the scent of moisture. A gentle mist fell.

His arm itched where the woman had bit him. He rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt. He recognized it as one he'd bought just last month. God, he'd bought his own funeral shirt. That was so messed up. He forced the thought away.

Somebody had washed off the blood that had covered his left forearm. There had been so much of it. He grew woozy at the memory of bits of flesh hanging from the woman's mouth and his blood darkening her lips.

The gash was still there, white bone glistening underneath. Guy probed at the wound's edge. He felt the pressure of his touch, but no pain. He yanked the sleeve back down, wishing he hadn't looked at the reminder that he was not alive.

Car doors slammed in the funeral home's parking lot. Beneath a light made fuzzy by the mist, his family stood around his father's black Audi A6.

Guy's voice caught in his throat. He suddenly wanted nothing more than to let his mother hold him like she did when he was five years old and sick. His father put an arm around her. Her skin was sallow, the circles under her eyes dark. His father reached his other arm for Guy's sister Sabrina. She shrugged away from his grasp, crossed her arms, and stalked across the parking lot, her heels clicking a rapid staccato. Her black skirt swished in rhythm with her stride, showing off legs toned by tennis.

_Gastrocnemius and soleus_ , Guy thought, recalling the names of the calf muscles. The soleus had been so named because of its resemblance to a filet of sole. Guy had eaten sole the night before the trip to Mexico. It had been flaky, seasoned with lemon, delicious. He wondered if Sabrina's soleus would go down so easily.

He staggered back, covering his mouth with his hand. What was wrong with him? How could he think that of his own sister? How could he think that of _anybody_? He didn't dare try to find comfort with his family, not with these revolting thoughts going through his mind. He fled. Misty rain mingled with hot tears and blurred his vision.

The sidewalk sloped down, leading him past a line of cottages. The flicker of TV lights came through most of the windows. Somebody was baking cookies, the sugary scent wafting. They were all alive, leading normal lives. Lucky bastards.

The residential street met with a busier thoroughfare. A gas station occupied the far corner, and the near corner held a Pacific Burgers restaurant. The smell of greasy burgers and fries filled the air. Guy's stomach rumbled.

Maybe regular food would take care of his hunger. He hurried forward.

A scrawny kid dressed in shades of gray walked from the restaurant towards a silver Nissan. Thin white wires led from inside his clothes to his ears. He bobbed his head, paying no attention to his surroundings. In one hand he carried a bag bulging with food, and in the other he held a large soda.

Guy sprinted towards the kid, snatched the bag, and kept running. Behind him, the kid cried out, "Hey, man, that's my food!" Guy ran into somebody's dark backyard, leapt a wooden fence into an alley, and kept going until he reached the end of the block.

He wasn't winded. Not at all. He could have kept running if he wanted. But the hunger had grown, grabbing at his insides and twisting.

Guy ripped the bag open, spilling wrapped burgers, fries, and onion rings everywhere. He yanked the wrapper off one burger and wolfed it down, hardly tasting it.

He fell to his knees. Everything he just ate rushed up and out, spilling all over the ground. He wiped his mouth with a couple of napkins.

He nibbled at a fry, then waited. His stomach heaved again. His mind turned to the kid he'd stolen the food from. The kid didn't have much flesh on his bones, but meat was meat.

Guy squeezed his head with both hands as if he could drive the thoughts out by force.

"I am _not_ a zombie," he said. Zombies shambled. They were thoughtless. Or slaves. Guy didn't shamble, he could think, and he wasn't a slave. Well, maybe he was a slave to his hunger.

Killing people was not an option. Guy supposed he could isolate himself and let himself die, permanently this time. But could he die? What if he just got hungrier and hungrier until he couldn't control himself at all?

A couple of summers before, he worked at Seattle Hospital in administration. He had explored the entire building, fascinated with how such a huge place kept running. They incinerated human tissue in the basement, limbs from amputations, diseased tissue, things like that. He could maybe nibble on a toe that nobody needed anymore. Then he wouldn't have to kill anybody, and maybe this overwhelming urge for human flesh would go away.

The thought of eating part of a person sent his skin crawling, whether from repulsion or excitement he couldn't tell. But it was better than his other choices. Guy started walking, keeping to the shadows and away from people. He wasn't scared of anyone. He was scared _for_ them.

The rain had stopped. Seattle's skyline twinkled, the space needle's deck and restaurant perched on a spindly stalk. A pang went through Guy's heart at the sight. Before it always had meant home, but there was no such thing as home now.

He bowed his head, plunged his hands in his pockets, and trudged on. Quaint cottages gave way to homes with sagging front porches, peeling paint, and wooden fences that leaned precariously. Most porches were in darkness, and few homes had lights on inside. Heavy bass came from nearby, reminding Guy of the club in Matamoros and the woman who had bit him. Maybe she had started out just like him, not intending to hurt anybody. Maybe part of her really didn't want to hurt him but she couldn't control herself. His steps quickened.

The rumble of a poorly working muffler came from behind, growing louder. Then an old Toyota Camry chugged past, driven by a young woman, her hair in a ponytail. The car had no license plate, but a temporary tag was taped inside the back window. A second car, a silver Nissan like the one belonging to the hamburger kid, followed it, driven by a thin-faced young woman.

The Toyota slowed, its left turn signal blinking. The Nissan slowed, but not enough. It hit the first car with a crunch.

The Toyota's driver twisted in her seat to look behind her, frowned, and muttered something that looked like "shit." She got out of the car, wearing rumpled blue scrubs and sneakers. The second driver got out also.

Guy paused, the hairs along his neck rising. Something bothered him, but he couldn't pinpoint what.

The women met in between the cars. The first gestured towards her car's bumper and began speaking. The anger in her voice was evident, even if Guy couldn't make out the words.

The Nissan swayed. There was somebody else in it. A warning cry rose to Guy's lips, but before he could utter a sound, someone burst out of the back seat, dressed all in gray. The hamburger kid. He jumped in the Toyota's open door.

The car's owner ran after him. "No you don't!" Her words rang clear.

They played a tug-of-war with the door. Then the woman yanked it open, reached in, and dumped the kid onto the asphalt.

He kicked her legs from under her, spilling her onto the ground beside him. Then he was on his feet and kicking her head, her stomach, wherever he could land a blow.

The second woman pulled out a gun and aimed it at the Toyota's owner.

Guy pulled back into the shadows. He should leave, before this got uglier, before the clumsy thieves shot that woman and left her bleeding in the middle of the street. Bleeding and helpless to fight him if he wanted her.

He'd sooner leave her than desecrate her. And besides, the last time he'd involved himself, the woman he'd tried to help had bit him.

And yet, he couldn't let her die. Just because he was undead and had these urges didn't mean he could stop acting like a human being. He ran into the street and shouted. "Hey!"

Both thieves turned to him. The kid's face scrunched in anger. "You're the jerk who stole our food."

The woman thief's attention wavered between Guy, her partner, and the one on the ground. But she kept the gun pointed at the other woman.

"Here goes nothing," Guy muttered. He ran for the woman holding the gun.

The kid ran for the Toyota. The woman with the gun jerked her head between Guy and the other woman. On the ground, the woman moaned and stirred, then rose to her hands and knees.

The Toyota sputtered to life. The woman with the gun whirled on Guy and fired.

The bullet hit his left shoulder, spinning him left and pushing him back. Guy staggered. He looked at his shoulder, expecting blood to be gushing from the wound. Instead, he found a ragged tear in his dress shirt. He probed beneath that. Torn flesh marked the bullet's entrance. It didn't hurt at all.

He walked towards the woman with the gun. Her eyes widened as she raised trembling arms to aim the weapon at him. She shot him again, the bullet penetrating his gut this time. It slowed Guy for a couple of steps, then he kept on walking.

The woman made the sign of the cross and bolted for her car. Tires squealed against the road as she peeled out, taking the corner so fast that her outer tires came off the asphalt for a moment.

The kid got out of the Toyota with a gun drawn and pointed it at the woman who was still on the ground. Guy froze.

"If you take one step closer, I'll shoot her." The kid's voice broke on the last couple of words.

The woman's gaze moved between the kid and Guy a couple of times before she settled on Guy. Apparently she found him more of a threat than the gun.

"I just want to show you something." Guy slowly unbuttoned his shirt sleeve and rolled it up, exposing the torn flesh and slight glisten of bone.

The kid paled. The woman remained still as a stone.

"I'm a zombie," Guy said. The word hung in the air. Any hope that this wasn't real died when he admitted it to them. He swallowed the knot in his throat. He would mourn for himself later. For now he had to take care of that kid and the gun. "All I can think about is tasting human flesh. So shoot the girl, or shoot me. I'll still come after you." He ran his tongue over his lips.

The kid's Adam's apple bobbed several times. He had gone a little green.

"Or you could just leave," Guy said. "And not get eaten."

The thief backed towards the Toyota's open door, his gun still aimed at the woman.

She said, "Not in my car."

The kid's mouth opened.

Before he could protest, Guy said, "You'd better do as she says." He added a little growl to his words.

The kid turned and ran into the shadows, his footsteps fading fast, leaving Guy alone with the woman.

She was built like Marilyn Monroe, too heavy by society's standards, but just perfect in Guy's opinion. Hunger rose in a towering wave. His body shuddered with the effort to remain where he stood. He crouched, covering his head with his arms. Maybe if he didn't look at her...

"Hey, are you all right?" she asked.

Guy had asked the woman in the club's dark hall the same question right before she attacked him. If this was what she had been feeling, he could understand her biting him.

"Hospital," he said.

"I'll take you."

He shook his head. "Danger. Flesh. Hunger." He couldn't even form complete sentences. He could hardly think straight. It felt as if a fever raged in his head, clouding everything. If he bit the woman, had just a little of her flesh, he'd be able to think again. He squeezed his arms tighter against his head. If only he could force those thoughts out.

The car's trunk popped. "Get in," she said.

The trunk. He wouldn't be able to get at her from there. He shuffled quickly across the pavement and rolled into the trunk. She slammed it shut.

She drove fast, sending Guy careening. He didn't care.

~

Guy kept his gaze on the ground, his hunger having been sated by someone's amputated leg. He had avoided the area around the grapefruit-sized tumor on the femur. And now he avoided looking at the bones, wrapped in a plastic tarp. He would probably never be able to look at himself in the mirror again. And yet, what else could he have done? He would have attacked a person and probably killed them if he hadn't had this...alternative nourishment.

He and the Toyota's owner were behind the hospital, the massive air conditioning system nearby filling the air with a constant, loud drone. A chain link fence and tall shrubs hid them from the homes on the other side.

"Are you okay now?" the woman asked.

Guy nodded.

"My name is Clarissa." She cleared her throat. "Thank you for, well, saving me."

"Why didn't you just let them take your car?"

"I just bought it. I worked my ass off to get it, and I just worked a double shift...and I guess I was tired of being pushed around."

"Are you a nurse?"

"No, I'm a nursing assistant. But I'll be starting nursing school in the fall."

Guy kept his gaze averted. He stood, brushing dirt from his trousers. "Well, I guess I'll be going now. Before—" he bit his lip. _Before I hurt you._ "Before somebody comes out here and you get in trouble."

"Where will you go?"

He shrugged and started walking. Now that he could think clearly, he knew he had to stop himself before the hunger came over him again. He couldn't ask Clarissa to destroy him. She'd had such a rough night already. He would ask the mortician he had terrified back at the funeral home. He was sure the man would be only too happy to have a corpse back in its coffin where it belonged.

"Come home with me."

Guy paused. Had he heard right? Or had the noise from the air conditioning twisted her words?

She approached, stopped just out of arm's reach, Guy noticed wryly. "The house next to mine is abandoned. The people who crash there...sometimes they cause trouble. Really bad trouble. My mother's health isn't good, and I don't like leaving her alone at home with those kinds of people next door. If you were around, I'd feel a lot better." She clasped her hands together. "You'd have to stay next door, of course."

"Are you asking me to...eat them?"

Her eyebrows shot up. "No! Oh, God, no. But you're like a superhero. You take bullets and keep going." She stepped forward and laid a hand tentatively on his arm—his undamaged arm. "I could really use someone like you. So could my mother. So could the other people in our neighborhood being bullied around."

"I might have trouble controlling myself. Tonight I almost—"

She held up a hand. "I'll bring you what you need. Please. I could use your help."

Guy's hand rose to the bullet wound in his shoulder. He could be quite useful to people if he managed his cravings. A warm flicker of hope sprouted deep within him. "All right."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rebecca lives in New Mexico where she writes primarily fantasy and horror. Her first novel, Shards of History, is available from World Weaver Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncle John's Flush Fiction and in Stupefying Stories, and she is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. When she's not writing, she's usually spending time with her family, torturing patients as a physical therapist, or eating copious amounts of chocolate.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Luke Spooner a.k.a. 'Carrion House' currently lives and works in the South of England. Having recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree he is now a full time illustrator for just about any project that peaks his interest. Despite regular forays into children's books and fairy tales his true love lies in anything macabre, melancholy or dark in nature and essence. He believes that the job of putting someone else's words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures. www.carrionhouse.com www.facebook.com/CarrionHouse

#   
# Book Review

# Rogue Hunter: Inquest

From the Amazon.com Book Description:

" _LUST AND FURY COLLIDE IN A GALAXY ON THE VERGE OF WAR._ _

Fearing retribution from ruthless gangsters over an unsettled debt, intergalactic bounty hunter Zyra Zanr ventures to a distant world to collect the reward for Boris Skringler, a notorious terrorist, who has been sentenced to death by political rivals of the InterGalactic Alliance. When she fails to secure his release, she decides to break him out of prison. Zyra soon finds herself an unwilling participant in events that lead to a climactic showdown between the most powerful worlds in the galaxy.

Torn between her desperation to rid herself of the threats to her life and her guilt in agitating the conflict between two galactic superpowers, Zyra is horrified to learn that the lives of an entire world of people hinge on her ability to return Skringler to his captors. However, her distrust of Skringler gives way to lust, unraveling her plans. Will Zyra give into her passion and allow Skringler to go free? Or will she surrender him to her enemies to stop an impending war? The fate of billions depend on whether she chooses life for a killer or the death of her lover."_

Rogue Hunter: Inquest by Kevis Hendrickson (http://kevishendrickson.weebly.com/) is billed as a gritty sci-fi novel. Hendrickson has a several other publications listed on Amazon.com but this is the first I have read. Apparently it is the first is a series of books in which Hendrickson reboots the main character from a previous publication of his.

I received a flood of novel review inquiries for Issue 6, but I chose Rogue Hunter: Inquest based almost solely on the cover art. The art is eye catching and certainly enticed me to read more about this book. The idea of a bounty hunter story was also appealing, as I have always kept a space in my Sci-Fi heart for the bounty hunter.

This book follows Zyra Zanr, opening with her appearance before the Queen of New Venus for her crimes on their world. Zanr is accused of killing several New Venus guards and attempting to break out known terrorist Boris Skringler. Her likely punishment is death.

Hendrickson is a very talented wordsmith. He is very good at paining a visual scene in your mind and describing his characters. Unfortunately he bogs down the action scenes with over description. This makes the action scenes seem less intense and even a little boring at times. In some instances I simply felt like the author was trying to hit a word count. Hendrickson is a talent with words that ranks up there, but the application of this talent needs work.

I liked everything about Zyra. She was attractive, gritty, had real problems, and seemed intelligent. She was likeable but not so overly likeable that she didn't seem real. The only issue ties into the story, and that was her motivation. I didn't always understand what drove her.

Boris Skringler is a jerk and I didn't much care for him. Based on the story, I don't think I was supposed to like him. The Queen, she is forgettable. I don't even remember her name as I write this. Worst of all she clearly had no reason and made weird and rash choices. I didn't believe she could be a real person. Zyra's girlfriend didn't feel like her lover at all. I never felt like they had a connection. Unfortunately the romance wasn't there. Sure they had sex, but I didn't feel the connection.

The story starts with Zyra's trial in front of the queen. We then flash back. Then go back to the present. Then flash back for a long time. Then catch up with the present again. There wasn't much to tell you when you jumped back and forth. And while it really isn't confusing, it is certainly disjointed.

I loved the story up until it catches up with real time. I wanted answers to those questions the first chapter gave me. And I found myself reading quickly to get those answers. However once the InterGalactic Alliance fleet shows up, I'm suddenly thrown right out of the book. This happens well over half way into the book. Since that point we have been only seeing things in Zyra's point of view. Suddenly we are thrown into the queen's, then the Alliance fleet, and back around. It threw me out of the book and I put it down for several days.

The author would have benefited from a few point of view shifts earlier in the book. I found I didn't care about this sudden twist in the story. I cared about Zyra's story. I cared about whether or not she captured Boris. If it hadn't been for this sudden addition to the story, I would certainly say this is an excellent story. I love Zyra and I wanted her story. I didn't care about New Venus, the InterGalactic Alliance, or any of the things they brought into the story.

By the end of the story it was clear that the Alliance plays an important part in the world and clearly the author plans to write more in this world. But I think the plot points could have been presented better in Zyra's point of view. After all this is her story.

The book is short. I found that I could read through it quickly when time allowed. The book is sold on Amazon.com for $4.99 on Kindle and $7.99 on paperback. I would never pay $4.99 for a novel of this length in electronic form. And after reading the story, I see no justification for this price point. There is no value at that price. The paperback price is pretty good for the size, printing costs, and type of book that it is. If you are a paperback reader, the price is okay and you would probably find good value for the price.

Overall this is a fun read. It is a gritty sci-fi tale that is enjoyable to read over a weekend. There are faults to this book, but this is the kind of book you read for pure enjoyment to relax the mind. If the price point was better, I would certainly recommend sci-fi readers add it to their reading list.

The summary:

Rogue Hunter: Inquest

By Kevis Hendrickson

Published November 1, 2012

ASIN B009ZWLMNS

ISBN: 1479240125

Available on Kindle and in Paperback at: Amazon.com

US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009ZWLMNS/

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009ZWLMNS/

My ratings:

Prose: Good

Characters: Good

Story: Okay

Value: Poor

Overall: Okay/Good

Hendrickson is a talented wordsmith who can create great scenes and fill them with good characters. The story telling here is entertaining but not great. If you can get past the price point, this is an enjoyable and relaxing read.

#  
#  Knowledge You Can't Give

# By Brynna Ramin

# Art By: Tom Wieja

Below Obsidian City, John Stempfel held the city's towers on his shoulders, and Sally could never tell him anything useful on the telephone.

"I catered a graduation party today," she'd say. "I had to make two cakes because Nina—remember my new assistant?—because Nina spilled salt into the first one, then knocked it onto the floor."

"Oh," he'd say. "That must have been annoying."

"It was all right. How was your day?"

"Two men were injured today. I had to help support the extra weight until they brought in replacements."

"Oh. I'm sorry. Did you know them?"

"No better than anyone else I've met down here."

She couldn't picture the space below the black city streets. Any citizen aged eighteen to sixty could be called upon to go down to the tunnels to spend five years supporting the city. Sally and John had been married four years when John'd been called, and now it was seven. For her it was seven. He said time moved differently in the different light, slowed with the weight of the world.

His first weeks below, John had a lot to say. He had one half-hour break every day in which he could call her to tell her about the tunnels of air and light, where men could walk but where the buildings of the world would sink into the nothing. He told her of the scaled suits they had to wear to protect themselves from the heat and described the sounds of his tendons as they strained against the weight. Now, he didn't say much.

On an afternoon he didn't call—the eighth in a row—Sally catered a wedding. She was making the cake, which Nina had not touched, when the groom rushed in.

"Please, can someone help me with this bow tie? My best man's missing, my parents are drunk, I'm not allowed to see Tina until the ceremony, and I can't make this damn thing work."

Sally waited for someone else to answer, then sighed and set down her pastry bag. "Come on, let's get you out of here before you get icing on your shirt."

She went with him to his dressing room and stood on her toes to tie his bow, noticing how out of practice her fingers were. John used to insist on wearing bow ties with his suits, saying that they underlined the comedy of the sales world. She doubted they made bow ties to go with the scaled suits he wore now.

The groom pulled away to look at himself in the mirror. Sally peered over his shoulder, saw his nervous face, and began to cry.

"Are you all right?" the groom asked, fingers still at his throat.

"Fine, yes, fine. I'm sorry, I should get back to the kitchen."

Sally left him and found a bathroom where she could wash her face. "Oh, John," she said to herself. "How do people do this?"  
She finished the wedding, but the question never left her. That night, back in her apartment building (not one John held up; they never assigned the lifters to their families due to the pressure), she turned on every light she had, trying to make her white walls sparkle like the tunnels below. Three years before, she'd researched the support groups for left behind family members, and she pulled her stack of pamphlets out of storage. Back then, she hadn't been allowed to do anything but bake—the government said the workers enjoyed having something to eat aside from their specially designed rations. The nutrient cakes gave extra strength, took away the need for sleep, and could withstand the heat of the tunnels. Of course they tasted like shit.

She sorted through the groups offering a place to cry in company, and the ones where ranting was encouraged. She'd attended a few of the latter a year ago and gone to one of the protests at the mayoral mansion. A returnee had spoken about his dreadful experience below, and then the protesters had marched in a circle holding signs that called for shorter terms for the lifters, for more funding to discover other means to hold up the city, for anything that would change the way things were. When John had called her that night, she'd felt so proud to have something different to tell him. She had waited for the call, arranging every detail of the protest in her mind, rehearsing how should would describe the panic and defiance that had seized her when the police arrived to drive them back from the mayor's gate, relishing how she would explain the way one of the officers had even pulled out a truncheon. But when the call came, she'd only mentioned that she'd attended the rally before he interrupted her.

"What were you doing there?" he'd asked.

"Fighting for change." She hadn't planned on explaining that.

"What change? What change is there? Can there be?"

"Shorter terms..."

"Where do you think they'll get the people to replace the ones who come home earlier? Do you think I've spent years down here just so they can draft you the moment I get back topside? They'll have to get rid of half the draft restrictions. Never mind your old knee injury; they'd be too desperate for people down here to let you by on a medical waiver."

"We also want to increase science funding..."

"Shit, Sally! You're not a kid. Everything that isn't man-held sinks down here. There's not a damn thing science can do about it. I'd rather they spend their money making us more comfortable—better suits, or food, or figuring out how to shade our eyes. I've told you how the light down here passes through everything. And you want them to waste more time dropping stuff down here and seeing how long it takes to sink into the nothing?"

"I want you home," she'd said, "and not trapped beneath a hundred feet of rock."

"I've only got..."

"Three years left. That's nothing, right? What sort of marriage is it where a husband and wife say, 'Oh, it's only three more years without seeing each other.'"

"You want me to walk out now? Leave an extra load for everyone else? Be a deserter and get us kicked out of this and every other city that finds out about it?"

"I don't know!"

He'd made an excuse about having to return to his post, though she'd known his break wasn't over. She'd gone to one more meeting with the protest group before giving it up. The solace had gone out of it. No matter how many angles she looked at the problem from, she couldn't figure out a way to change things. He couldn't even come home for a break—once people left the tunnels, they could never go back. The human body couldn't handle it. John's first step out of the tunnels would remove them from his life forever. He just needed to make that step.

The wait had grown too long for Sally. She couldn't bear the strained phone calls, the feeling that he was a stranger, that her life had so little meaning compared to his down below. She wanted not commiseration, not even anger, but understanding—her own intimate understanding of her husband's current life. So she paged through the pamphlets and eventually found others who wanted that, too.

They called themselves Visions of Morning. When Sally called their number, the woman who answered refused to give her many details, but assured her that the group worked to help those who sought to "discover a greater intimacy with our lost ones through a deeper understanding of their plight in the tunnels." They arranged to meet.

A poorly rested Sally took the slide-train to the Gap the following morning. She swayed back and forth with the other passengers, her hand wrapped firmly around the overhead rope. Beneath the train's floor, blade-like wheels slid through the trough cut in the rock streets so quickly that beyond the open windows the city's buildings flitted past. She wondered if the light bouncing off of their walls was anything like the light below. She wondered which of these gleaming stone towers was being supported, even as she passed it, by her husband's strength. They changed his post often.

"It's supposed to help with the monotony," he'd said, two years before. "But it all seems the same to me."

"Aren't there easier spots? Couldn't you ask for those? I'm sure it must be easier to hold up a street than a building," she'd said.

"It all seems the same down here."

"There have to be lighter spots. Why can't you find one? I'm sure it would be better for you."

He'd sighed into the phone, his breath mingling with the loud air in the tunnels. "I'll try."

She hadn't believed him, of course. That had been the last time she'd called the tunnels herself. She still wanted to talk to him, longed to hear from him, but she had become embarrassed.

Sally reached the Gap around noon. A great chain-link fence, imported from one of the metallic cities, ran along the edge, dotted in the distance with black guard towers. Across the divide stood the towers of Slate City, gray and gloomy even in the bright midday sun. The train let off at a small viewing platform that jutted out over the Gap, and Sally saw a group of men and women standing against the fence, gazing down.

The crowd shifted, and Sally slowly made her way up to the fence. She couldn't even see them from this high up, but she knew that below, at the bottom of the stair cut into the rock face, lay the entrance to the tunnels. To her left, Sally saw the lone returnee in the crowd. Returnees were easy to spot: they all had skin like pottery—wrinkle free and hard. This woman leaned heavily against the fence, her arms reaching up to grasp the links just below the barbed wire. Sally looked away from her quickly. Sometimes returnees actually missed the tunnels. Sally wanted to feel sympathy for them, but right now she felt fear.

She returned her gaze to the Gap, pressing her head against the fence at different angles to see if any of them would give her a better view.

A few people looked at her with sympathy, and one put a hand on Sally's arm. "Sally Stempfel?"

Sally looked at a tall blonde woman of about forty. "Are you from Visions of Morning?"

"Yes. I'm Gertrude. If you'd still like, I can take you to our meeting house."

Sally nodded, and the woman led her from the platform. They walked away from the fence, back towards the houses not far from the Gap. The little rock homes were all covered with as much imported cloth as the inhabitants could afford, draped across windows, wound around porch railings, tacked into doors. Color was important in a city of black rock, but then rock was important in a city of cloth, and the trade generally evened out. It was the plants that were expensive, and Sally noted that none of these homes could afford so much as a flowerbed, let alone the full grass beds that decorated front yards in the city's nicer neighborhoods.

Gertrude showed her into a run-down building on the corner of the block. Sally saw that stones had been used to block up one of the windows, leaving only one open to let the sun in. She found the inside accordingly gloomy—just a wide front room with a door on the far wall. A group of men and women lounged in this front room, ranging from one boy who looked to be in his twenties to one woman who must have been seventy at the least. None of them were returnees. They sat on hard obsidian chairs and kept two lamps burning for extra light. Cushions had been procured for three of the older members, but the seat offered to Sally was uncomfortably jagged at the edge.

"Hello, dear," the oldest woman said. "We are Visions of Morning. My name is Michelle."

"Sally. I heard that you're trying to understand what it's like down there."

"For the past fifty years now," Michelle said. Her gray head bobbed up and down in the dim light. "If you're looking for the answer, you've come at just the right time. Whom are you waiting for, if you don't mind my asking?"  
"My husband. He's been there three years now. Are all of you waiting, too?"

"Some of us," Michelle said. "My son died there long ago. Harold lost his wife, and a few of the others have continued with us even after their loved one's return. They think it will help them to identify, even now."

"And what sort of work do you do here?"

"Not yet. We should get to know you first."

"All right," Sally said hesitantly.

They went around in a circle and made introductions, each member telling a tale of loss, no matter how old or temporary. It was exactly the sort of meeting Sally had wanted to avoid, except every once in a while members would go in and out of the back room. Sally singled out one man, Ernest, whose son had returned a year prior.

"Does he talk about it?" Sally asked.

"Not often. He says he just wants to live his life, reap the benefits of his hard work."

"He doesn't feel guilty about all of the people still waiting below?"

Ernest shrugged. "He says there's nothing he can do."

"And you still feel distant from him, even though he's been home a year?"

"Five years is a long time. Things don't just shift back. I want to know what happened to him."

"And how are you going to find out?" Sally asked.

Ernest smiled. "You'll learn that later; I can't tell you now. Michelle has been involved the longest, so she runs things here. She's a bit wary at first, but keep coming to the meetings, as often as you can, and she'll warm up."

Sally followed the advice, despite her doubts. She came to hear Ernest, and others like him, share what it was like to have their loved ones return. Some came home and spoke proudly of their accomplishments. These returnees wore their gray scale suits on the city holidays and kept in touch with those they had been in the tunnels with. Some came back crippled at twenty-three, unfit for most jobs. These said bitter words about the tunnels and became tyrannical towards their families, demanding sacrifice for the work they'd done. But most were just distant, like Ernest's son, and it was this reaction that Sally feared most. She would understand if John came home bitter, or if he embraced his duty with overblown pride. But the idea of never knowing what had happened to him, or what effect those events would have on his future self...She couldn't live that way.

So she went to the meetings, and eventually won the trust of the older members, Michelle included. Four months after Sally's first visit, Michelle stood up on her shaky legs and took Sally's hand.

"It's time to show you our little back room."

Sally almost dragged the old woman towards the back door and fidgeted while it was unlocked and opened. There was no window on the other side. A lantern had been set up against the back wall, illuminating the mouth of a great hole in the floor. Far below, Sally could hear the sounds of metal against rock.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A tunnel. We've been working on it for six years now, in spare moments and with the few workers we've had available. It goes down into the rock, below the fence, and soon we will break out into the open. It's a tunnel into the Gap."

Sally's breath caught in her throat. "Does it go down into the tunnels?"

Michelle shook her head. "Not that far—we were afraid it would be noticed if we tried that. But it goes down far enough that if we try at night, we should be able to lower ourselves down on some rope and see the tunnels ourselves."

Sally looked at the hole in wonder. No matter how many returnees she spoke to, she never seemed to get the picture of the tunnels that John saw, never could understand how life worked down there. But if she could actually see the tunnels, touch them herself...She reached her hands down and caressed the stone lip of the hole. "When will it be ready? Can I help?"

"Our expert, Ronald—he's an architect, and knows more about the city and the rock than the rest of us—Ronald says that it shouldn't be more than two weeks. Normally he'd love the help, but this close to completion, we don't want to risk the results on an amateur. He and the crew will finish up. But you are welcome to go down the tunnel when it is ready. I will be too old, I'm afraid, to make the journey, and some of the others are too timid to be lowered by rope. But if you are willing, we will all eagerly await your report."

"I'll do it," Sally said. They could have suspended her from any point in the world as long as in the end she'd be just a hair's width closer to John.

She neglected business for the next two weeks, going to the little meeting house every day. The final date wasn't certain until a day beforehand, but she had plenty of time to bake a cake in celebration. The evening that Ronald and his crew broke through into the Gap, they ate well, drank good wine, and planned for the following evening's descent.

Of the eleven who declared themselves willing to descend on the first night, only six arrived, and of those, only two were brave enough to go before Sally. They were granted their order requests based on seniority, and so Sally found herself waiting near the tunnel's entrance behind Ernest while Gertrude lowered herself down to get a glimpse of her son's temporary home. The trip seemed to take a long time, but when Gertrude was finally led back up out of the shaft, only half an hour had passed.

Gertrude was shaking, as if from extreme cold, and had her arms wrapped around herself.

"What happened?" asked Michelle, who was waiting at the entrance with Sally and the others.

Gertrude shook her head. "It was so lovely, all that light, but when I got close, I just couldn't reach out to it. I was afraid to touch it. All this work, and I was too afraid."

Tears leaked from the woman's eyes, and Michelle hugged her close. "It's all right. You'll be able to try again if you need to."

Murmuring similar words of encouragement, she led the shaken women out. Sally stood silent in the near dark while the others whispered, her thoughts stuck on Gertrude's failure. Shortly, Ronald poked his head out of the tunnel mouth.

"We're ready for you, Ernest. Are you still coming?"

He stepped to the tunnel mouth, then slid his foot back out and turned to Sally. "You want to go first? I wanted someone to try it before me, see if it's worth anything. I don't want to get down there and find out I can't hack it, and that it wouldn't matter if I could."

"All right." Sally hesitated, suddenly realizing that more than just her own hopes rested on what she might see or do below. She took a deep breath and quickly slipped past Ernest into the tunnel. Ronald held a lantern, and Sally noted all the little flaws in the rounded walls. The rough rock sloped ever downwards, twisting and turning. The air became cooler and cooler, and eventually there was a light ahead that didn't come from the lantern.

The tunnel widened into a flat mouth at the bottom where three other sturdily built men waited with a rope in their hands.

"All right," Ronald said, "we've built the tunnel so that it comes out about one hundred yards away from the steps, so you shouldn't be spotted by the guards. We're going to tie this around your waist and legs, then lower you down. When you want to come back up, tug three times, and we'll start hauling. We're a pretty strong bunch, but do your best to climb the wall to help us out. Ready?"

Sally nodded. She looked over into the Gap while the rope was tied into a makeshift harness. Below, she could see a faint glow, where the tunnels of air and light let out into the bottom of the Gap. It flickered, and she pictured her first touch of that desired radiance.

"All right, you're as secure as we can make you," Ronald said. "Time to start."

Sally knelt at the edge of the tunnel mouth and felt down the rock face with her left foot for a place to rest her weight. She found a spot that would support her and, rope gripped tightly, began her descent.

Above, she heard the occasional grunt from the men lowering her. The light didn't carry far, and she was forced to let go of the rope and feel the rock with her hands to find additional holds. The rope bit into her waist and thighs, and the ragged rock face hurt her skin. Below her, the air warmed, and the yellow shine from the tunnels grew. Eventually, she could see again. Close up, the light from the tunnels was not pure yellow, but shot through with white shards, like glass flying through the night. She could almost reach this with her foot when she stopped moving. They've run out of rope on top, she thought. And she was too short to reach the rest of the way.

Sally rearranged herself on the now unpleasantly hot rock. She could see easily now, and found a good shallow ledge on which she could rest her weight. Clinging to the rope with one hand, she began to untie the knots around her middle with the other. It was difficult one-handed work, but she managed. With the extra slack, she thought she'd be able to touch the light, if she was brave enough to try.

Sally took a deep breath, wrapped the rope a few times around her right wrist, and pushed away from the rock.

The drop wrenched her shoulder and the rope tore into the skin of her right arm, but she held on and didn't fall. Dangling, she regained as much of her nerve as she could and reached down with her left hand. She stretched and strained and caught some of the light on her fingers.

It burned. She felt her left hand shredded by the little white shards mixed in with the yellow heat and cried out into the night.

Sally snatched her hand back and swung to the safety of the rock face. She cradled her raw hand against her chest, unable to stand the pain of holding the rope in it. She scrabbled with her feet against the rock until she regained her shallow ledge and tugged three times on the rope. They dragged her, almost entirely unaided, all the way back up to the top. They even had to pull her back into the mouth of the tunnel, where she sat shivering, her arm dislocated.

"What did you do to yourself?" Ronald asked.

Sally just shook her head, and began to cry. Hot, large tears, the sort that she'd cried after she'd watched her grandmother die of a heart attack. The others didn't seem sure how to react, but Sally ignored them in her grief. It was futile; the whole thing was futile. She'd never be able to know anything, to bear up under anything that John had undergone, was undergoing while she sat here huddled in a tunnel, black and dark like the ones below never were.

"We'd better get you back up to the house," Ronald said after a few minutes. "I think you'll need a doctor."

They helped her back up into the obsidian house. Gertrude still waited in the outer room and said she knew where there was a hospital. Sally walked with her in silence the entire way, unsure of the passing time. She grunted with pain when they fixed her shoulder and hissed when they cleaned and dressed her burns, but nothing compared to the ache of her grief.

When the doctors had finished and pronounced her fit to go home, Sally found Gertrude still waiting for her.

"I wanted to see if you were all right," Gertrude said.

"I'll live."

"And I wanted to know what it was like, what it felt like when you touched the light."

Sally stared at her, this woman who'd gone so close to the tunnels and yet hadn't had the strength to touch them. "He wasn't there," she said at last. "I can feel the pain inside me, and I'll carry the sight with me, but my John is not in that light."

Gertrude nodded. "I was afraid of that. That's what held me back, in the end. But I'm glad I know. Are you going to tell the others?"

Sally shook her head. "It doesn't translate from person to person," she said. "You have to see for yourself. They need to know that we'll never understand what it's like to have the physical world on our shoulders, no matter how close we get. They'll never believe it from me, just like I never believed it when I couldn't understand what John said on the telephone."

Gertrude looked disappointed. "Can I walk you home?"

"No. I'll be fine on my own." Sally looked at her bandaged hand and laughed. "I don't know how I'm going to explain this at work. I'll have to pretend I burnt myself on my own stove, an embarrassing admission for a professional chef."

Gertrude squirmed at the joke. "Good night, then."

"Good night."

As she walked home, Sally watched the city in a way she never had, living in it every day. She noted how the buildings looked in the darkness and the noise the wind made whistling between the black towers. When it began to rain, she watched the drops bouncing off the ground in the light from the street lamps, and when it became lighter, she committed to memory the sound of the city waking. The black of shadow bled from the black of stone and the sunlight reflected off of the polished stone, littering the dark city with spots of white. She took in the city's transformation and realized that while she could never understand John's stay in the tunnels, she might make him understand the life he waited for topside.

She called the tunnels when she got inside. A supervisor answered the extension and told her John was still on his shift.

"Can you give him a message?" Sally asked.

"I can try."

"Tell him his wife called. Tell him that it was night here, and dark. Tell him that the only light outside was the street lamps, and they only made little puddles on the black rock, so that the obsidian glittered like a secret."

There was a pause from the other end of the phone. "All right," the supervisor said. "I'll do my best."

She thought she'd heard the man laugh, but John did call her that evening. She told him all about the birds and the shadows and what the city above the tunnels of air and light was like, just in case he'd forgotten. And she told him about her day in the kitchen, and about how Nina was turning out. She told him all the secrets of her ordinary day, without the self-conscious reticence that had plagued their earlier conversations. She told him everything that remained the same in her life and hoped that in the end he could take in her words and remember how to relate to that life when all he had to look at was cruel light and the straining bodies of strangers.

"You sound lonely," John said when she stopped.

"I am," she said.

"Me too," he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Brynna Ramin spent her formative years reading stories about dragons and derring-do, and now has to spend her days doing something very practical as penance. She writes fantasy in her off hours to compensate. This is her first published short story.

#  The Hanging Gardener

# By Ryan Harvey

From a recently recovered fragment of Book XVI of _Geographica_ by Strabo. The papyrus is currently in the collection of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin for study to determine its authenticity:

"The most magnificent sight in Babylon is said to have been the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis, which lay to the northwest of the palace along the waters of the Euphrates during the reign of the Chaldean kings. The ground is now barren, desolate in a desolate city. It would seem that an earthquake leveled the gardens and the temple of the Babylonian gods, but a fable remains popular even in these times when the great city is merely a great desert..."

~

It was a portentously wet spring in the region of the two rivers. Rainfall was always welcome in the dry lands of Babylonia, but these continuous storms over the city were unclean omens. Each night the skies simmered with gangrenous colors and bolts of light that made the priests of Marduk tremble and clutch their amulets to protect them from the demons who lurked in the clouds.

Seluku the gardener was interested in the stormy season for one reason. It meant King Nebuchadnezzar would be more paranoid about the priests of Marduk in their temple that towered in the middle of the city. The king continually watched the priests with suspicion, and more than once when he suspected they were using dark magic, he called on the special services of Seluku and his tools of the great gardens to trim their ranks.

The Hanging Gardens on their seven terraces were a marvel to the known world, and lured travelers from every corner of Nebuchadnezzer's empire, and also from the lands of Persia, Arabia, Egypt, and Greece. The king claimed he built this paradise of vines and flowers to comfort his Median wife Amytis, but it was really to show how Babylon's might crushed Assyria and surpassed the famous gardens of Nineveh. That Nebuchadnezzar could raise a jungle from the desert was more humbling to the enemies of Babylonia than all the chariots and iron spears of the kingdom.

The sight of this forest climbing in tiers from the edge of the Euphrates filled every spectator with wonder. It washed away memories of how many had entered the gardens, and never returned.

The sting of a scorpion hatched from a brood scooped into a plant brought from Batrachia...a scratch from a poisoned thorn on a black locust bush from the highlands of Armenia...an accidental fall from one of the high steps into a nest of brambles...there were many ways a visitor to the gardens might succumb to its beauties. Seluku knew each one and was always inventing more. He tempered each slaughter into a work of art, testing venomous snakes collected from bazaars, growing new strains of poison-dripping buds, and seeking fresh accidents to claim whomever the king decided should never leave the gardens.

It was a simple arrangement. In the morning, a royal courier came to Seluku in his hut beside the lowest terrace and delivered a message: "The Great King of Babylonia, beloved of Marduk and Ishtar, wishes that So-and-So enjoy the full hospitality of the gardens during his visit tomorrow."

And, as certain as the rivers flood and the sun rises, So-and-So would die the next day in an unfortunate accident. Such was the occasional price of a visit to the most beautiful place in the kingdom.

On the night of the harshest storm of that spring, Seluku was alone on the highest tier. He sat on the glazed tile steps of the shrine to Ishtar that nestled among a grove of cedars at the edge of pool. Seluku at first enjoyed watching the boiling sky. He welcomed the last week of rain that made a mist shroud over the treetops: it turned the Hanging Gardens into their own world, one that Seluku felt belonged to him alone during those moments.

This storm, however, turned into a queasy sight. The rain appeared to fall only on the tiers of the Temple of Marduk. It was as if the god were pouring a pitcher of Heaven's waters onto his temple. The clouds circled the peak of the building like water swirling down a drain. For brief moments it seemed as if dead fish eyes and the hoofed feet of mountain goats roiled within the clouds, but Seluku knew these were only the sky's deceptions. Any great storm brings a slight madness.

A lightning bolt struck, arcing between the clouds and the top of the temple. The burn it left on Seluku's eyes was leprous green, like a rot on a palm leaf. When his sight cleared, he expected to see the whole top tier of the temple in ruins. But it stood as before, and the drain-swirl of the clouds started to clear.

The sound of the thunder reached the gardens and made the fronds quiver. The noise was deeper than any thunder that Seluku had heard before. A voice cried from its depths a name he did not know— _Shupnikkurat_ —but which could belong to nothing except a demon.

But the cry was a trick like those seen in the clouds. As the thunder faded, so did the storm. The cloud swirl ebbed away so quickly it was as if Marduk's hand had cleared it away. Stars filled the heavens again. The evening star was more lucent and strange than Seluku remembered it.

He reached into a pouch around his belt and took out his bronze amulet. It was a ward against demons that he kept as a habit; he was more afraid of the king's anger than that of a demon. But now he pressed the amulet against his breast and tried to remember one of the incantations against the demoness Lamashtu.

The moment of religious dread passed with the last wisps of the storm, and he thought of a more practical matter. Tomorrow, almost certainly, he would receive a messenger from the king and a new request for Seluku's special hospitality.

~

"Katuwas is a Canaanite who has come to the city to serve as a lamentation priest. Show him all courtesies."

Seluku did not recognize the name, which was why the messenger had added the short explanation before he left. A visiting priest did make sense, however. A foreigner and his strange ways would make the king nervous after the disturbances in the night. The ruler of Babylonia would have no upstarts inside the priesthood rallying the others to defy his decrees. Seluku started the business of planning a welcome for Katuwas of Canaan.

He had thought of this greeting a few months earlier. He had hoped to use it on a dignitary from Egypt, since he would enjoy the spectacular killing of one of that ugly race. But once he had gathered the material for it, the plan could only keep so long. When the gardener thought about the monstrous shapes of eyes and goats' legs he had imagined in the clouds, and the blasphemous cry dreamed in the thunder, it felt right that the priest from Canaan whose dark magic might have caused it should die in the most vicious trap Seluku had yet devised.

The priests arrived in the late afternoon, coming at an invitation from the king to give their blessings to the gardens after the trouble in the heavens. They marched up the Processional Way, a turquoise groove cut through the city beside the current of the Euphrates that led north from the square of the temple to the gates of the palace. They walked beneath palm fronds waving in the hands of novitiates, boys who hoped to protect their families from demons through service to Marduk.

When the priests reached the gates of the palace, royal servants took them to an oared boat that would ferry them over the moat to the gardens. A footbridge led over to the southern gates, but a water crossing would confuse any demons who might slink after them.

Seluku needed no help from the guards escorting the priests to tell him which one of them was Katuwas. Among the white robes and red headdresses of the servants of Marduk was a man anyone would mistake for a beggar in his tattered and dust-stained robes that were ripped off above his knees. He had a silver amulet around his neck and a crooked staff with the head of Marduk perched uneasily on its knob, but these tokens were all that might show him a servitor to the god of Babylon. His limbs were parched desert shrubs, and his skin must have seen the unprotected winds of the wastes to the south. Seluku wondered why the skin didn't simply slide off his bones.

The gardener started to regret using such a magnificent murder tool against a pathetic figure. The gods were already killing this man, and perhaps Seluku should finish the job with a mere push from the second terrace into the Euphrates.

But the preparations were in place and the fires already heating the cauldron. Seluku would carry it through as planned.

The royal gardeners gathered at the quay before the south gate. Ebon-skinned Nubian slaves pulled at the oars and brought the boat to the dock. The priests stepped out with the help of the gardeners, who bowed and accepted the blessing of Marduk that each of the holy men offered. They formed into two lines on the quay, with Katuwas a dreary smudge at the end.

Visits from the temple occurred a few times a year, usually on ritual holidays, and the procedure was always the same. The priests would walk up the great stairway to each of the seven terraces. If Seluku had the task to show one of them the king's special courtesy, he had to find a way to remove the priest from the rest and the finish the job in the maze of arches and tangle of foliage.

Fortunately, the other priests made Seluku's job easier. They had no wish to be near the ragged Canaanite visitor. When he stumbled from the boat so that he almost fell back down into the moat waters, the High Priest Mushezib said, "Perhaps you should wait at the dock if you are so fatigued from your devotions last night."

Katuwas leaned against his staff and managed to find his sand-choked voice: "No, I must go on. _She_ would want me to see such growth, such life."

"Excuse me, exalted sirs," Seluku interrupted with a bow. "I do not mind taking the visitor among you on a slower walk through the gardens."

The entire assemblage sighed with relief to be rid of the shambling foreigner. "Be it so," the High Priest said, stroking the tight braids of his beard in satisfaction. "Katuwas, this gardener will let you see whatever you wish, and you do not need to participate in the blessing of the garden."

"You would not want my blessing. _Her_ blessing."

Only Seluku heard this. The priests had already turned away and started up the alabaster stairway toward the second terrace of the gardens, marching between the guardian statues of bull-headed shedu.

Katuwas now turned rheumy eyes to Seluku. "Kind of you to offer. Kind and brave."

"Why 'brave'?"

"I—am a dangerous man. Not always. But then _She_ spoke to me. And then _She_ brought her young down to me. Now I am oh so dangerous." He started to cough, which almost folded him in half. It was a moist hacking sound, and Seluku tried not to laugh. Oh yes, here was a _dangerous_ man!

But when the coughing fit was finished, Seluku felt a shade of dark around his heart. There was something unclean about this priest beyond his skin and clothes. No wonder Nebuchadnezzar wished him dead.

"This way, eminence." Seluku urged him across a matting of velvet grass brought from the old gardens of conquered Nineveh. "I shall take you to a narrower stair with landings where you can rest. It leads to places no less beautiful in the gardens."

The tattered thing muttered, and flinched away from the gardener touching him. He sulked behind as they walked toward the southwest corner of the gardens. They began to climb a stairway that was used to watch over one of the water screws. Usually, slaves turned the wheel that cranked the screws that lifted water from the river up to the canals that veined through the plants, but the recent storms had filled the reservoirs and dampened the soil.

Katuwas clunked along under a canopy of teakwood trees. Seluku thought he smelled like embalming salts, and the mixture of his scent and the perfume of the lilacs made for a nauseous combination. He started to think he would enjoy killing this dusty mummy with his special plan.

The higher they rose from the river, the more the sounds of the peculiarly isolated world of the gardens took over, with the buzz of gnats and bees and the chatter of red-plumed birds arguing with each other closing out Babylon beyond.

Seluku had so far offered no comments about the beauties of vegetation or the wonders of the arches that held up each tier. Soon the priest decided to fill up the silence with more of his mutterings, but Seluku gave him only half an ear. His attention was on the path they would take to a new section of the gardens on the sixth terrace, where the masons had recently bricked out pits that were ready for layers of bitumen, and then the rich river soil, and at last the foreign seeds to send down deep and strong roots.

Katuwas moved with agonizing slowness the higher they climbed. The foliage became lusher in the higher and cleaner air. Fishtail palms blocked the sun, Abyssinian jasmine dangled down the walls like a pink arras, and fig trees from conquered Judah hung their purple fruit low over the stone pathways. The more serene and lovely the gardens became, the more that Seluku noticed his guest moving in unpleasant twitches. At first he thought it was only the aging bones of the man, yet the spasms were _too_ lively. Then Seluku noticed that Katuwas was not as old as he had at first thought. The cracks across his face that the gardener had mistaken for decades of wear in the desert seemed almost fresh, like a land recently furrowed with the plow. The skin between the cracks was almost fresh soil. The priest's gauntness looked less like the curse of old age and more like the gnarled bodies of madmen in the temple squares who starved themselves to the point where they hoped demons would ignore them as meatless morsels not worth carrying off.

Katuwas babbled during his spasms. He spoke of his goddess, Attar, whom Seluku knew was the Canaanite name for Ishtar, the Great Mother. Seluku was proud that he could read and write Akkadian as well as speak Aramaic, so he had read from royal scrolls and knew more about the conquered lands than most commoners. It was how he learned so much about poisons, snares, and deadly animals. It was also how he learned of the many names of the Great Mother: Inanna, Attar, Astarte, and ones in forgotten languages so garbled that even his skilled tongue could not handle them.

The sky was losing light, and the heat of spring turning to damp warmth before Katuwas's spoutings started to make sense. "This garden is a mockery of other lands. I've traveled to them, and they are not paradises, but hells. I went far into them. Too far. I sought Attar's first temple, deep into the Crimson Desert."

"And did you find it, eminence?" It was only a distraction to ask, since they were coming nearer to the empty pit where the king's orders were to be fulfilled.

"I did...after six nights march through dead lands where even the Arab wanderers would never dare, I found _the City_."

"Indeed. What city?" It was an absent question, because they had reached the south side of the terrace where Seluku had laid his trap. The walk had crawled on so long that he was worried the fires under the bronze pot would have gone out and the bitumen started to harden.

"The City of Lost Pillars. The one the gods cursed and sank into the desert's ocean. Harag-Kolath, beneath the well of Ast-Shizar, a many-pillared beast sleeping under a blanket of dark sand."

"Astonishing." Seluku brought them to a stop in a natural shrine made from the straight trunks of Phoenician pines. The trees raised hackles on Seluku's neck because of the black of their bark, their rigid growth like a wall of spears, and most of all the aroma that knew nothing of the desert and made him feel even smaller than when he stood in the shadow of the Temple of Marduk.

Katuwas still talked as he rested against the staff. "I discovered the hidden way. One of the ghuls who keeps sentry saw me, and knew I was seeking their mistress. The black goatish things with no eyes surrounded me and gibbered in their hideous tongue, then pushed me down a tunnel that dropped into the pits of Nergal and a blackness the gods could not make even if they extinguished the sun—"

Seluku was thinking of a different pit while Katuwas yapped. He stood at the edge of the baked-brick pit that the slaves had dug a month ago for a new stand of pines. He estimated it was a drop of about twenty spans to the bottom. Shoving the tattered priest into it would kill the bony thing instantly, and Seluku wanted to enjoy the man's final moments.

Katuwas had his gray eyes fixed on the hands of pines stretched overhead. "They brought me to the altar in the depths—the place where _She_ consumes her sacrifices. I was the goatish things' offering, but then _She_ saw me. Her many eyes woke in the rocks, and black things like tar oozed from the walls. The ghuls crawled back and shivered to hear the sounds of many shrilling flutes that sounded Her true name—"

Seluku had only heard the word _tar_ clearly. He walked to the enormous iron cauldron beside the pit. It was hinged on struts that raise it over the wood fires Seluku had set hours ago. The fires were almost out, but inside the pot the bitumen was still bubbling and letting off its black stench with each bubble burst.

"And, at that, _She_ let me go. The ghuls parted, just as the men of Judah say their god parted the seas for them. And I left, carrying a gift from _Her_."

"And what would that be, old man?" Seluku needed the mad priest distracted for a few more seconds now that he had decided a way to get him down into the pit in one piece so his suffering would last.

"It was a tablet with a chant to summon one of the Thousand Young. Yesterday, I stood on the heights, and I called to it!"

His head was bent back so far toward the small gap of sky between the pillars of Abyssinian wood that if his mouth were open, it could be a reservoir for the gardens.

Seluku picked up a spade. It had the right weight. It wouldn't kill, but it would do the job needed.

"I called it with the language of those before man, and the spawn of the Great Mother descended from the watery star, and shouted _Her_ name: _Ea! Ea! Shupnik_ —"

The rest of the name vanished with the _clang_ of the spade against bone. The blow did not snap the neck. Seluku had used his muscles just enough to stun the priest. The man crumpled, and Seluku dropped the spade and grabbed him in time to keep him from tumbling into the pit.

He pulled a creeping vine from the growths around the feet of the pines. He tied the tough fibers under Katuwas's armpits and finished the knot. The man was not completely unconscious, but mumbling odd names that were neither Aramaic nor Akkadian.

Seluku had watched King Nebuchadnezzar lower traitors into dens filled with desert cats and listened to their screams as claws and fangs shredded them. It was from the king's chief torturer, Amel, that Seluku had learned his craft. Lowering Katuwas's limp body into the pit on the vine rope reminded him of the work that Amel once did. Amel had ended up in one of those lion pits himself. He became too good at his job, and the king decided he would prefer that Amel not find a way to work those skills on him. This often happened to those around the king. Seluku had found a way to practice his talents far from the court.

The gaunt priest dropped onto the warm bricks at the pit's bottom. He lay face down and his groans were the only signs that he was still alive.

Seluku whipped the end of the vine. It lashed at Katuwas's back, and the shriveled priest stirred. "Wake up, you crazy heap of camel dung. I don't want you going to meet Nergal in your sleep. There's no joy in that." He tossed the rest of the vine into the pit and moved to the cauldron.

Katuwas turned around, moving his arms in jerks that copied the skittering of a spider. It unnerved Seluku to see it, and he thought about speeding up the death so he could be done with the strange man. But when he began tilting the cauldron on its hinges to pour the hot tar, he felt the rush of excitement at the elegant completion of another job for the king. He would savor each second of the bitumen scalding and swallowing the crazed Canaanite.

Katuwas sat against the brick wall farthest from where the tar was dribbling down and starting to seep across the pit floor.

"I am the vessel. If I die—"

"Which is certain."

"—then it will be unleashed. _Her_ spawn. I am the vessel. If I die—"

"Shut up! I've had enough of this mad chatter. The more you talk, the slower this tar will eat and smother you." This was a lie. Seluku was now burning with the thought of how slowly he could make Katuwas die. He had to keep up a certain pace of the flow or the bitumen would harden too fast. But he had watched the masons and their slaves do the task enough times that he knew the right tilt of the cauldron to keep the hot ooze creeping along.

Katuwas did not move until the black edge reached his sandals. His madness made him iron, and Seluku wondered what had actually happened to the man in the wastes of the Crimson Desert, if indeed he had gone there. He must have seen something that had aged and harrowed him, and it bothered Seluku's pride to think that perhaps he was showing _mercy_ to this demon-cursed fool by killing him.

Katuwas flinched as the heat touched him. The black crawled over his foot, and the leather sandal smoked and burned away. He did not scream, however. Seluku was disappointed. He tipped the cauldron over a notch more; the flow had to go faster, he needed the screams.

"I was to keep it, take it to the north. Others would gather there, in Nineveh's ruins, and unleash them all together. But if I die here—"

Dammit, why wouldn't he stop talking and start screaming?

"—it will rave and rejoice in the growths and the fruit and seeds, and—"

Katuwas could no longer hold back. Pain shot though his voice as the bubbling tar crawled over his legs. The acrid sting of burning flesh reached Seluku's nose.

The priest screamed out a litany of names. Gods and demons. It was a flood of languages, many made with sounds that Seluku thought should not be permitted to man's tongue. They rolled out of Katuwas's sunken chest in an impossible way. This smoldering, dying creature should not be able to speak in echoes like boulders dropping down a well.

"Ea, Assatur! Sakkuth at Arag-Kolath! Ea, Shupnikkurat! Black goat of the Cedars with a Thousand Young!"

The sounds of the storm...Seluku felt it now. The words in the roiling clouds the night the bolt struck the Temple of Marduk and yet left it standing. The roar of that storm bellowed from the chest of Katuwas. As the oil burned up his arms, crawled over his chest—Seluku had tipped the cauldron all the way over to deluge the man and silence him as fast as possible—the skin across Katuwas's body _rippled_. It was caused by the waves of heat, it had to be. But the man's face was also twisting, his skin blackening before the tar reached it.

At the end, Seluku had to shut his eyes. He would have covered his ears if he didn't need to hold onto the cauldron to pour out the last drop of liquid murder. But before he clamped his eyelids shut, he thought he had seen a growth like weeds crawling up from the tar and disintegrating flesh, and dead eyes with green slits peering from the surface that covered Katuwas's body.

Then there was silence, after a last bubbling call of the secret name of Attar, Ishtar, and Astarte, before the bitumen choked the priest's throat and closed over his head.

Seluku stumbled and fell back onto the grass around one of the pines. He pitched over and vomited out his dinner of fish and bread. His head swam as if he had drank three jars of the worst wine of the two rivers. For a moment, he was filled with such revulsion at the memories of the screams and the contorting body that he thought he would surrender his job as the king's prized murderer.

Then he pulled himself together. His craft had sharpened his mind to a single purpose, and that carried him out of the brew of imagined bizarre sights and blasphemous cries. It came from the wet spring storms; they brought madness. When the hot summer burned through, Seluku and the entire city would feel like themselves again.

He started to get up. But the grass would not let him.

The thick blades, brought from the plains of Lydia, were wrapped around his wrists. Their touch was like dead horseflesh. Seluku pulled, and broke free, but the grass groped at him as he drew away.

The paved ground beneath him was as still as the ground should be. He was certain he was not dreaming. But when he stared at the soil-filled pits around the steaming new one, the grass waved in an unseen wind, dancing to an unheard piper, and the cedars were bending over to listen closer to the song.

The tar was cooling, but a few bubbles burst on the surface. Seluku drew nearer, feeling that the silent song was coming from the pit. He stared down into the pool of tar.

A hundred eyes stared back up at him. Perfect globes, with blotches of green for pupils, like those of a grotesque squid laid out at market. They did not blink, but instead sunk down into the fetid black, but always some hundred new eyes rose to replace them.

Then came the mouths, slits rimmed with needle teeth. They oozed alongside the eyes and spit and vomited the language Katuwas had tried to speak when he was still partly a man and the thing inside him that came from the stars was pushing against his flesh walls.

The ooze of eyes and mouths, and now other hideous organs and limbs, slurped from the pit, like a billowing foam on a dark sea. The grove of cedar and grass leaned in, closing about Seluku and the garbling thing climbing from its spawning ground.

The purposeful side of Seluku's mind told him to _run_. This side won, and he dashed for the nearest stairs.

His first thought was to go to the Shrine of Ishtar at the pinnacle of the garden, only one tier above him. Among the welcoming cypress trees, away from the bitter pines. Perhaps Ishtar would protect him from this spawn of some older Great Mother. Seluku had read, and tried to forget, scrolls about older gods, the ones whom Marduk overthrew when he slew Tiamat and Kingu. They were darker tyrants before even Ea and Enil, earlier than the gods that Sargon of Akkad worshipped. Perhaps their names entangled with other gods, or they were mercifully forgotten.

This was more thought than Seluku had ever given to the gods. But as the narrow part of his mind pushed him up the wide stairs guarded by statues of lion-headed Ninurtu, the sleeping part of his mind heard the slither of the thing behind him, dragging loam and soil and trees with it, the suckers of its mouths pulling it along and uprooting all growing things to flow into it. He did not dare look back to see if it were true.

His hand clutched at the often forgotten amulet in his pouch. He slipped it around his neck, but that would be like a shield of papyrus against a bull's charge. He asked for protection with the few chants of the _Utukku Lemnutu_ that he could remember. But this was no demon. He longed for something as earthly as Lamashtu or Pazuzu, a human wearing the head of a beast, stomping up the stairs behind him.

Ishtar's shrine met him at the top tier in its clean cypress grove under the moon. The golden bulls marching across the lapis-lazuli lintels were the mark of man's artistry, and beautiful in their order. Then Seluku turned around, and saw the chaos of the thing that had infected the gardens beneath him.

Palm fronds had turned into grasping claws cutting grooves in the brick terraces. Vines whipped like tangles of sea snakes lashing to free themselves. Each level further below was falling into a pool of black putrescence. A cackling growth of weeds, thorns, and infected blooms flowed in the slime. Eyes and mouths punctured the surface, the orifices praising the Great Mother with her eldest name: _Shupnikkurat!_

The mass had not reached the last tier yet. It no longer cared about the puny gardener. The memories of its flesh vessel, Katuwas, were of no matter any more. The spawn wanted only to rejoice in the mesh of life into which it had poured. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were its body and its feast.

But what would it feast on when it was done?

Seluku wrenched his eyes away from the nauseous mass. Fear and an empty stomach kept him from being sick once again. He saw across the city clouds circling around the Temple of Marduk, as they had they night before.

The craftsman's mind in Seluku woke up. He needed to find an escape before the weeds and slime and the many mouths consumed him. He knew the Gardens better than any man, for how else could he become a better assassin than any man? Now he needed to use the knowledge to save a life—his own. Later he would worry about saving his mind.

The gargle of the thousand mouths was now a cachinnation of tongues never spoken in any land. Again they shouted the mystery name of the Great Mother, the goddess before Ishtar, and the storm pulled tighter around the temple's peak. _Ea! Ea! Shupnikkurat!_

Seluku remembered the water screws. One of the reservoirs that fed the waterfalls to the rest of the gardens lay behind the shrine. An idea burst into his head that would have seemed insane if the world had not already gone insane.

As he moved to try it, the first fiery missile landed in the squirming mass of the gardens. Soldiers of the palace and the city walls had at last received orders to burn down the monstrosity in the royal gardens. The catapults that normally aimed outside the city wall to keep back the threat of the Medes were hastily turned about to hurl pots of burning oil toward the seething sickness under the moonlight.

Fires burst as some missiles hit and the clay jars shattered. The spawn in the gardens hissed with its thousands of mouths. Steam curled from the liquid surface, and reeking clouds started to rise toward the seventh tier. The rain of burning jars was coming steadily, and the black steam made a curtain that thankfully blocked Seluku's view of the breeding pit of filth. He had just enough of his mind left to try his plan.

He ran to the reservoir in the shadows behind the shrine. The screws that usually brought water up were shivering from the force below, but Seluku was only interested in how the water got down.

A metal gate blocked the sluice that released the water into the falls and canals of the lower terraces. It was closed, waiting for the next dry spell. Seluku leaped into the reservoir, which was filled deep enough from the rains that it came up to his neck. The water felt cool, clean—perhaps the last undefiled spot in the gardens. He thought about floating there in its protection until the end came. But above he heard the mix of exploding jars, flames, steam, and the chattering of the spawn Katuwas had brought. Rising around the edge of his sight came a crawling flood, which at first he thought were the sucking tendrils of the thing, but then saw was an army fleeing the onslaught: thousands of ebony scorpions scurrying in a carpet toward the water. Behind them rose the living dark and the scalding air. The Great Mother's name howled in clouds closing around them.

Seluku swam to the sluice, grabbed at the rope hooked to the pulley above it, and yanked at it.

He was dragged feet-first toward the opening with the rush of water. He took a last breath of the fresh air and tightened his body into a ball as he plunged down the waterway.

Seluku rode the current that cascaded over the sludge of eyes, claws, mouths. Gargantuan reaching arms twisted from cypress trunks, bulges of loam spiked with chunks of masonry slithered around him like a tangle of worms, leaves turned into tufts of hair growing from an obscene parody of bodies.

The clean water found a fast path, moving so swiftly that the burgeoning thing that had seized the gardens did not notice it. It was railing and babbling at the fire striking at it.

As he tumbled through the nightmare, Seluku thought of how Tiamat must have fallen when Marduk overthrew her. The steam sizzled the air, and Seluku felt scalding pain across his body. It seemed the heat would force his eyes to boil from his skull—but at least that would mean he no longer had to see the madness around him.

Then icy water doused all the steam and pain as Seluku the gardener splashed into the waters of the Euphrates that divided the city.

He lay on his back, stinking oils around him keeping him afloat, until he bumped into a quay on the western bank of the river. His fingers scrabbled into the masonry to stop himself. Skin peeled off in a glove from his hand where the steam had burned it. But his fingernails gripped a crevice, and he pulled himself up onto the top of the pylon. The ends of his fingers bled from where he had torn away his nails in the last effort.

Looking like a stick figure on a poorly cast amulet that could not even ward away the demon lord of dung beetles, Seluku huddled on the stone pylon and watched the end.

The gardens were moving. The fire stinging the thing had aggravated it enough that it lurched down from the arches and terraces that slaves had spent twenty years building. Soil, mud, trees, shrubs—it all slithered down from the foundation, pulled by the many tendrils and arms flung out from it.

The city walls shivered as the stones of the gardens tore apart. The spawn crushed the place where it had perched, and the arches crumbled in its slimy trail. Catapults continued to fling burning missiles at it, but it was moving fast, squishing forward. It fell into the trench of the Processional Way and squirmed along it.

All of Babylon that had woken up to the sound now watched at the mass that wormed through the middle of the city toward the Temple of Marduk, where the final blasphemy would happen. The clouds were again turning into a gyre around the top of the temple, and a lightning-ringed funnel opened in the sky.

Like a frog covered in mud trying to crawl up a riverbank, the spawn reached the end of the Processional Way and hefted itself up the tiers of the temple. The walls that Marduk himself was said to protect from all harm crumbled under the sucking grip of the many limbs and chewing mouths. The dark mass of what had been the Hanging Gardens reached the top of the temple, and the trails of its body dribbled down the sides.

For an instant, it seemed to take on a shape something like a man. Two pillars raised up toward the hole in the sky, where the light of Venus was a glaring eye. The arms of the thing implored the Great Mother to take it up again. The sky shouted back at it— _Ea! Ea! Shupikkurat!_ —and then one of the Thousand Young was drawn up into the swirl of the storm, with all the remains of garden clinging to its slimy form.

It was like watching a ship dragged into a whirlpool, seen upside down. The force took away the abomination, and the stones of the temple circled up after it. The top half of the Temple of Marduk, tallest building in the world, was pulled into the sky before the door of the heavens snapped shut.

The sky went silent, and the only sound over the city was that of settling steam.

Moments later came screams of madness. Then the temple stones started to plummet from the air.

~

The palace survived, but the rot along the Processional Way was so putrid that it killed fish in the Euphrates beside it. No one in Babylon again walked that path, and the last kings would only move south in boats along the river.

Slaves destroyed the remaining pieces of the garden's terraces. Many of them died choking on a pestilence in the air, or were killed by strange snakes and scorpions that were changed from the horror. The king and the priesthood were for once in agreement: the spot was declared forever cursed by the Lamashtu—she was the easiest, and the sanest, to blame—and ringed with amulet stones to keep the evil contained.

Seluku was almost dead when the guards found him. The scalding across his body made him hard to recognize, but what was left of his blistered tongue was able to tell them his name. They dragged him to the palace and did not bother to bring him to Nebuchadnezzar, but tossed him in a dungeon pit and forgot about him along with other wretches who had stood too close to the madness and whose minds had not survived.

Seluku's mind, however, was intact. He hated it for that. He quivered in a corner away from the madmen, blocking his sight but still seeing the eyes, eyes, eyes, and hearing the last calls of Katuwas as the tar slid over him. At least the gardener would never have to stare at the sky again, or see anything that grew or crawled.

The others in the pit starved to death slowly, but Seluku's burns took him in only a day. It was the greatest blessing he could have asked from whatever gods existed.

~

The Strabo fragment concludes:

"This tale that a traveler may still hear is never spoken in a manner of a jest, and those along the river say that it was this destruction of the Hanging Gardens and the ruin of the temple that weakened the Chaldean rulers. King Nebuchadnezzar died that same year, and a short time after, Cyrus the Persian was able to take the city with hardly any spilling of blood.

"The ancients of Mesopotamia were a superstitious people, their gods strange and wrathful, and so the tale may be nothing but an Oriental fancy. Yet to this day nothing grows where the Hanging Gardens once stood, and the stars that look down on slumbering Babylon seem to glower with a disapproval seen nowhere else on earth."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ryan Harvey won the Writers of the Future Contest for his story "An Acolyte of Black Spires," part of his science-fantasy series set in the continent of Ahn-Tarqa. His work has appeared in _Black Gate_ , _Every Day Fiction_ , _Beyond Centauri_ , _Aoife's Kiss_ , and the anthology _Candle in the Attic Window_. He also writes a weekly column at the website for _Black Gate_. He lives in Los Angeles with one cat and one less dog. Find him at his website, www.RyanHarveyWriter.com and follow him on Twitter @RHarveyWriter.

#  Year One Anthology

# And Giveaway!

We are so excited to have made it to one year in print. We have packed six great issues of some of the best in speculative fiction. We want to celebrate that by putting together a great anthology. But we need your help to pull it off. We want to know what stories you'd like to see in the anthology.

There will be twelve stories in the anthology. One story from each issue will be picked based on your votes. The story with the most votes will be put into the anthology. The editors of Plasma Frequency will pick a second story from each issue.

Voting is open now and will remain open until June 30, 2013.

Voting is simple. Visit our website. Click on the Year One Survey Link. Take a brief survey about what you'd like to see in our second year, and then pick your favorites from each of our issues.

Besides letting our readers help make our anthology, we are also having a giveaway with all kinds of prizes. An Amazon Gift Card and free copies of our Anthology are offered up as prizes. To enter our giveaway, visit our website and click on the Year One Celebration link.

Good Luck!

# Terms and Conditions

# For entering the giveaway.

The following Terms and Conditions apply to all those entering this contest. By entering this contest you agree to all terms and conditions mentioned below.

1) All information must be truthful and accurate. The contest moderator will review all entries. Those entries that provide false or incorrect entries will be deleted with out notice to the entrant.

2) Moderator reserves the right to delete entries that are duplicated by the same entrant.

3) This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. We hereby release Facebook of any liability.

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7) Entrant is responsible for ensuring moderator has a valid way of contacting the entrant should they win. In the event the winning entrant does not claim the prize within 20 days of the end of the contest, the prize will be considered forfeit. In the event that the moderator attempts to contact the winning entrant and the provided method of contact is invalid (i.e. disconnected phone numbers, email that is returned to sender, mail is returned to sender) the prize will be considered forfeit.

8) Shipping costs to the Continental United States will be paid for by the contest moderator. Shipping to destinations outside the United States may not be covered. If the winning entrant chooses to have an item shipped outside the United States, the winning entrant will have a choice to pay shipping costs, or forfeit the prize.

9) Prizes will be drawn in the following order: Amazon Gift Card, Paperback Anthologies, Kindle Anthologies. Amazon Gift card will be paid in US dollars only. Prizes are not exchangeable or substitutable.

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12) By entering this contest you agree to all terms and conditions of the contest.

