Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Adaptation and Predation

Escape Pod on 12/11/15

Everyone thrives in someone else’s version of hell. For the Quinix, this meant sheer canyon walls a hundred kilometers deep, every surface coated with a thick layer of red-orange vegetation and bioluminescent fungus. The arachnids liked to string cables in complex patterns from wall to canyon wall and built nests where the cables crossed. For them, each oblong, womb-like nest was no doubt cozy and safe. For me and every other off-worlder on Sadura, you were made constantly aware of the fact that, with just the right (or wrong) application of balance, you would plummet to a death so far below that you’d have plenty of time to think about it on the way down.

I’d seen more than a few fall—Dryth tourists to little fluffly Lhassa pups, all screaming their way down into the abyss. In the dim, humid depths of the Saduran canyons, the bodies were hard to find.

For that reason, among others, I came here to kill people for money. I make a good living.

Tonight I had a fat contract on a big Lorca—an apex predator, both because of his fangs and his bank account. As a scavenger, living on the bottom of the food chain my entire life, the irony was delicious. Here I was, a lowly Tohrroid—a slop, a gobbler, a smack—paid top dollar to do in some big shot whose trash my ancestors have been eating for ages. Sooner or later, the bottom feeders always get their due, don’t they?

Either that, or I was going to wind up dead.

I knew the Lorca liked to dine at the Zaltarrie, and I knew he’d be there tonight. I’d spent the last few weeks shadowing one of the wait-staff—a Lhassa mare with the fetching chestnut mane, a full quartet of teats, and the long graceful neck that fit with Lhassa standards of beauty. I had practiced forming her face in a mirror—the big golden-brown eyes with the long, thick lashes were the hardest—and now I had it down pat. I could even copy a couple of her facial expressions.

The Zaltarrie hung like a fat egg-sac in the center of one of the deeper canyons, webbed to the walls by at least five hundred diamond-hard cables, some of which were thick enough to run gondolas from the artificial cave systems that honeycombed the walls and were home to the less authentic Saduran resort locales. The Zaltarrie, though, was all about local flavor and a kind of edgy, exotic energy that appealed to the young, the bold, and the hopelessly cool.

I came in through the staff entrance already ‘wearing’ my uniform—a black, form-fitting bodysuit with a wrist console tying me into the club’s central hospitality net. The Quinix manager at the back door gave me an eight-eyed glare which I took to indicate curiosity. Most staff changed once they were here, I guessed, but I’d simply shaped my outer membrane to mimic the look of the clothes without bothering. It was a necessity; while I understand how elbows and ball-in-socket joints work in theory, mimicking the biomechanics of it all while stuffing an arm in a t-shirt is something else entirely. At any rate, I brushed past his fuzzy, leggy body and headed to the floor.

The music hit my whole body at once. It was a sultry, lilting Dryth ballad sung by a particularly attractive Lhassa mare dressed in a kind of micro-thin smart-gown that barely qualified as a garment. She was backed up by a small clutch of Voosk with the matching plumage to indicate they were part of the same flock. They had no instruments; with Vooskan vocal chords, they didn’t need them. The song shook me to my core, and I mean that literally. I see, I hear, I smell, and I feel with the same organ—my external membranes, my skin. The volume on that Lhassa crooner was such to make me wish I had a garment to hide behind. It made me sag in the door for a minute while I acclimated myself to the ambient sound. Between the thick pipe smoke and the freely flowing narcotics, nobody noticed.

The Great Races can’t appreciate the things they have. Take the Zaltarrie, for instance. Lush carpets, thick as an uncut lawn. The scent of finely spiced food. Each chair and cushion hand-stitched by arachnid feet from synthetic fabrics so smooth and soft they barely existed but as a sensation of cool breath on the backside of so many clothed bipeds. The music, too, and the pipe smoke and the low murmur of polite conversation in a half-dozen languages—all of this world of sensation, and it had to be funneled through at tight array of tiny sensory organs clustered at one end of some clunky organism’s static body. I could feel, taste, see, and hear it all at once and wear the experience as a garment, yet I was surrounded by organisms who sat in little fortresses of their own mind, carefully sifting through a couple streams of sensory information as suspiciously and greedily as customs agents looking for a bribe. It almost made me pity them, moments like this.

Don’t worry—the feeling passed. Screw those people.

I glided across floor, sweeping the faces clustered around the tables for my ‘date’ for the evening—Tagrod the Balthest, the Lorca shipping mogul. He was easy to spot; Lorca always are. He would have topped three meters standing, had he been standing. Instead, the great businessman lay across a mammoth divan no doubt custom designed for his use, his four lower limbs tucked beneath his lithe, muscular lower body. His torso was wrapped in Quinixi silk, black as charcoal and broad as the gondola that probably took him here. His forelimbs were folded across his chest, and I noted his talons were untrimmed—a mark of wealth. If all went well, I’d see him dead inside two hours. If not, I’d probably get a first-hand look at his digestive tract.

Lorca of such stature as Tagrod are never alone. He had a half dozen retainers—two Dryth bodyguards in armorgel suits, a snail-like Thraad with a control rig and a few servo-drones floating around, and a trio of overweight Lhassa mares chained by the neck and marked on the forehead with Tagrod’s personal sigil. These last were feed slaves. Tagrod kept to the old ways, where the predator/prey relationship between his species and the Lhassa was still observed. Just judging from the expressions on a few Lhassa faces elsewhere in the room, there were even odds I wasn’t the only person there planning to kill the big Lorca. I was, however, the only person sauntering towards his table with a packet of metabolic poison stashed in a vacuole hidden in my ‘abdomen’ and a multi-pistol likewise concealed within my ‘ribcage’.

An intoxicated Lhassa bull leaned out of a booth and pinched my backside. My buttocks clenched in what was probably an unnatural way—contracting like some kind of mollusk into a shell. I danced away, hoping he didn’t notice, and tossed my long neck so my mane flipped away from him—Lhassa body language that indicated I wasn’t interested in coupling with him. The bull laughed and followed me with his eyes until it was clear I was heading towards Tagrod’s table. Then he mouthed something cruel about me to his friends and turned away. Any mare who was going to speak with a Lorca was clearly beneath him, anyway. Lucky break. I made a mental note to avoid any other handsy Lhassa bulls—I looked convincing, but not so convincing a good fondling wouldn’t find me out.

The ballad was wrapping up just as I reached the corner where the big Lorca was splayed out. There were hoots of adulation from the tables in a dozen different languages made with as many different sets of alien vocal chords, noise bladders, or what-have-you. Tagrod clapped his taloned hands a couple times and roared, smiling. I got a good look at his three interlocking rows of needle-sharp teeth. I found myself hoping I’d estimated the dosage on the poison correctly—a half-dead Lorca could still do some pretty serious damage to an entirely-alive me.

One of the Dryth guards stopped me before I’d gotten within arm’s reach of Tagrod’s table. Like a typical Dryth, he was a compact and functional biped, knots of bumpy muscle in all the right places, and a face as smooth and streamlined as the prow of an airship. “We’ve already ordered.” The Dryth announced.

“I understand, sir. We’ve got a few specials, though, and the manager was concerned that your master hadn’t heard them before making his selection.”

The Dryth wasn’t buying it. His eyes—blue-white and sharp as ice picks—searched my face for some sign of deception. My deadpan, though, is unbeatable—it isn’t even really a face, after all.

Tagrod’s voice was a deep, resonant purr. “Othrick, please—the lady wishes to speak with me. Let her through.”

I had to keep my external membranes from shuddering in relief. Killing a Lorca is a lot like fishing: it’s all about the bait you use. Tonight, the bait was my assumed shape, and I’d just gotten a nibble.

One of the Thraad’s servo-drones pulled a chair out for me. The Dryth patted me down for weapons without so much as an ‘excuse me,’ and it took much of my concentration to keep my “body” appropriately rigid as to simulate a real Lhassa’s endoskeleton. I had practiced this, though, and there was no danger of him finding anything—my weapons were in vacuoles hidden inside my body. Unless he actually scanned me or I accidentally jiggled in the wrong place, I was safe. Comparatively, anyway.

Behind me, the Lhassa singer started into another number, this one in a language I didn’t recognize. Reflexively, I fiddled with the translator I’d hidden inside my ‘head’ until I got the words right. It was a Lhassa dirge from a subculture I wasn’t aware of. The Voosk did their best impression of a trio of sultry woodwinds, striking a jazzy backdrop to what was essentially a song about a mare’s children all dying in a fire. Leave it to the Lhassa to make something like that sound sexy.

Tagrod gave the Thraad a significant glance and the slimy bookkeeper twiddled a few tentacles. One of the servo drones chirped an acknowledgement and the song dimmed behind a dampening field. The big Lorca gave me an exploratory sniff from his perch. Even with two thirds of his body lying down, I was only at his eye-level. At this distance, I could easily see how his species could devour a full-grown Lhassa in one sitting—his great jaws could probably fit around my shoulders even before they unhinged to swallow me. There was a second—just the barest second—where I felt a sense of terror at his presence and wanted to run. I had to remind myself that, between the two of us, I was the dangerous one here. Predatory species or not, he wasn’t a trained killer, he was a business man—a three meter tall, five-hundred kilo, carnivorous businessman.

For some reason I didn’t feel much better.

“You don’t usually work this shift.” Tagrod observed.

I made a conscious effort to blink. “You noticed?”

Tagrod smiled, but didn’t show me his teeth. “My dear, every Lorca can’t help but notice the Lhassa around them. An old instinct, you understand—don’t be frightened.”

I made my eyes flick towards the feed slaves, who were absently stuffing their faces with sautéed crimson slugs. They hadn’t even given me so much as a glance since I’d sat down.

Tagrod picked up on the gesture and nodded. “All my slaves are voluntary. Their families are handsomely paid. I’m sorry if they make you uncomfortable.”

I shook my head. “No. No, it’s all right.”

Tagrod purred at a low, powerful volume that made my body shiver. “So pleasant to meet a Lhassa who understands. So few of your kind can rise above their instincts. Our two species are interdependent. Your people have provided the numbers and done all the great labor. We Lorca have provided the vision. Like all good predators, we drove our prey to greatness.”

It was an old tale—the famous refrain of the oppressor: “but where would you be without me?” I know more about this than even the Lhassa do. Intelligent blobs of omnivorous, asexual goo do not advance well in a society full of so-called higher-order beings. My people eat trash in waste dumps and everybody thinks they’ve done us a favor. I wasn’t even spoken to by one of the Great Races until I was nearly a full cycle old, even though I worked in a restaurant like this one, surrounded by people. I was paid in table scraps.

“Are you all right?” Tagrod asked.

I realized I had been neglecting my facial expressions. I went back to work, batting my long eyelashes and smoothing my mane with one hand. “Sorry. I was just…just remembering something.”

The Dryth guard who had patted me down returned from some kind of errand. He leaned over and whispered in Tagrod’s ear. I turned my head away, making it look like I was watching the stage, but I focused most of my attention on the Dryth’s lips. I didn’t catch it all, but I caught the gist.

“Othrick tells me that you aren’t even on the schedule today, Tal.” Tagrod reached down and speared a slug with a single talon. He popped it in his mouth, again giving me a chance to see those impressive teeth. “Is this true?”

I curled my neck in the Lhassae gesture of embarrassment. “Yes.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Othrick asked, his hand resting on the ornately carved butt of his multipistol.

“Forgive Othrick,” Tagrod said, grinning. “He always suspects that a Lhassa is planning to kill me. We’re friends, though—aren’t we?”

I shrugged. “I suppose.”

The big Lorca nodded. “Good, good. I’m glad.” He leaned forward, sniffing me with his broad nostrils. “You smell strangely.”

“I wear perfume.”

Tagrod grunted. “I don’t think that’s it.”

I stood ready to pop the multipistol out of my chest and drill the giant merchant at the slightest sign of the Dryth going for their weapons or of those big talons reaching out for me. Had I underestimated the Lorcan olfactory abilities, or maybe Tagrod had had them boosted somehow? It didn’t matter. I made my face look confused; I decided to reel him in a little early: “I’m sick.”

“I see.” Tagrod hummed. “Is it serious?”

I mimicked embarrassment as best I could. I leaned close, but not too close—no free Lhassa gets too close to a Lorca willingly—and stage-whispered. “I had an accident. A couple organs were ruined real bad. I got some germline engineered replacements, but…”

“But they’re losing integrity, aren’t they?” Tagrod shook his mammoth head and clicked his muscular tongue. “A cheap clinic, poor standards. Probably promised you the stars, didn’t they?”

I hung my head. “Yeah…pretty much.”

A single talon caught me by the chin, but so gently that it was barely a caress. Soft pressure made me raise my head and meet the grand, yellow eyes of the Lhassa’s ancient predator. “Which organs, pretty Tal?”

“Both kidneys, a liver, part of my heart…” I tried to whip up some tears, but I’ve never had the knack—no really effective valves for that kind of thing in my external membranes. I settled, instead, for a shuddering sigh.

Tagrod frowned at this for a moment, then rolled his massive shoulders in a Lorcan shrug. “That sounds like quite an accident.”

“There are a lot of accidents on Sadura.” I shot back, putting a little steel into my voice. I was letting the big fish play with the line now, giving him some slack to drag out. If he thought the catch was too easy or if he smelled a trap, my hook wouldn’t set.

Tagrod hummed. “Quite true.”

Everybody at the table was watching me. Othrick and the other Dryth were ready for action, probably worried I had a sliverblade secreted in my marsupium or something. The Thraad had both his eyestalks trained on me, his tentacles quivering with a kind of academic interest at my behavior. Even the feed slaves had finished their feasting and were eyeing me with expressions that were probably unreadable even for other Lhassa, let alone me. I wondered what that was about—was I competition of some kind? Did they hope Tagrod would devour me before themselves?

“Tell me, Tal, why did you come to see me?” Tagrod asked. He folded his arms.

Carefully, carefully…“I was interested in speaking with you. You don’t seem as cruel as…as…”

“As you’ve heard Lorca to be?” Tagrod laughed sharply. “Charming, simply charming. This truly is the planet of the adventurous, isn’t it?”

I bowed my head in acceptance of his praise. It never hurt to stoke the ego of an apex predator.

Tagrod smiled at me and told me things I already knew. “My slaves have dined, and I regret I am about to depart. I have appreciated your company, little Tal.”

“I’m leaving too.” I said.

I could see the thoughts clicking into place in the Lorca’s head. The words he said next were the words I had been hoping to hear all night. “Would you care to accompany me? It is so rare I am able to converse with a free Lhassa. I would hear tales of the homeworld.”

I did my best to look cautious. “I don’t know.” I made a show of glancing back at the other Lhassa scattered around the floor at the Zaltarrie. I knew that many of them had been shooting me and Tagrod dirty looks ever since I came over here, but this was the first time I allowed myself to act as if I knew.

Tagrod snorted. “Don’t mind them. Small minds and small hearts—vestiges of a bygone era. You’ve outgrown them, Tal.” He held out his hand, talons and all, for me to take it. “Shall we?”

I have a lot of textural control over my external membranes, but simulating skin that felt perfectly to the touch could be difficult. I focused as much of my concentration as I could spare on making my hand feel right and gently laid my palm on his. My little Lhassa-size hand seemed like a dry leaf atop the large, flat boulder of the Lorca’s palm. Had I bones, I might have been worried about him crushing me. As it stood, he merely placed his other hand atop mine and held it there for a moment. He smiled, still keeping his teeth hidden. In his great, yellow eyes I saw something like affection. Maybe he thought of me as a pet; maybe his overtures of companionship were sincere. I doubted it. “I’ll go with you.” I said.

Tagrod stood, his massive bulk shifting the delicate balance of the entire club as it was suspended between its thousand Qunixi spindles. The Zaltarrie swayed slightly, as though moved by a gentle breeze. At the great Lorca’s stirring, a host of black-clad Qunixi seemed to appear from nowhere. The arachnids shifted tables and shooed patrons from his path with a flurry of hairy-legged activity so he could move to the service entrance—the only door large enough to easily admit him. Othrick preceded his master out the door while the other Dryth kept his unblinking eyes fixed on me. I fell in with the Thraad, who evidently wasn’t the chatty type; he slid along on his single muscular foot with barely even a flick of an eye-stalk in my direction. As we left, our little parade drew the baleful glares of more than a few Lhassa. I knew they considered me—well, considered Tal—a traitor, but that fact made no impact on me. How easily they judged how others sought to survive, the self-righteous prigs. Every creature had to find its niche—how did they know this wouldn’t be Tal’s? Who were they to deny her it?

This train of thought was academic, though—I wasn’t Tal in the first place, and I was about to do something most of the Lhassa in that room would approve of, anyway. I focused on the task at hand. Slowly, I pushed the multipistol near the surface of my body and held it between my Lhassa breasts. It was a sleek model and only made the slightest bulge beneath my ‘clothing.’ We would see how long it would take the Dryth to notice it.

Outside, we found ourselves standing on an aluminum terrace that jutted out of the side of the Zaltarrie. Just over our heads were wrist-thick bundles of Quinixi cabling that protruded from the spherical bulk of the club at regular intervals. Large bins of garbage were lined up on either side of the door. In one bin I could hear the thumping and squelching of one of my own species, feeding on the scraps tossed out for vermin like itself.

Like me.

As we stood there, waiting for Tagrod’s air-yacht to arrive, the scavenging Tohrroid poked a pseudopod above the edge of the trash bin to get a look at us. It colored itself bright green to attract attention and warbled something in a loose approximation of Dryth Basic. “Food? Food? Please?” It reached out to us, forming a crude four-finger hand.

The feed-slaves recoiled from its touch. The Dryth behind me stepped forward to slap away its tendril. “Get back in the trash, smack!” The Tohrroid withdrew its tendril immediately and went back to trying to digest whatever semi-organic refuse it had come upon. The Dryth wiped his hand on his sleeve. “Ugh. I think it slimed on me.”

Tagrod laughed in rich, musical tones. He reached into his robe and withdrew a small confection of some kind. He threw it in the trash bin and gave me a wink. “The Dryth never have understood charity, have they, Tal?”

I hugged myself, as though cold. “The smacks have always creeped me out, too. I think everybody should look like…like something. Like what they are.”

“Ah,” said Tagrod, “but that would remove all the excitement in life, wouldn’t it?”

That statement bothered me. I managed to suppress a shudder—he didn’t know anything. He was a sham—his charity, his gentility, his humor—all a big lie designed to lure in prey. Just like me. Just like everybody.

We all looked up as the yacht appeared with the heavy thrum of AG boosters. It swung as close as it could without brushing the spindles and extended an umbilical for us to travel up. The yacht had an open-deck plan, kitted out like a pleasure cruiser but with a former military frame. I could see where the guns had once been mounted in the prow, and I wondered what the ship’s core AI thought of its new role in life, assuming they’d left the AI intact when it was repurposed, of course.

Once on board, we rose up about three hundred meters at a slow climb, the yacht pivoting itself gently to avoid all the spindles and cables that crisscrossed every open space. The Thraad disappeared below deck along with the Dryth and Tagrod himself. That left the feed-slaves and me, as well as a couple of the servo drones. One of them brought me a drink unbidden; I wasn’t so foolish as to drink it.

“He’ll have you first, you know.” One of the slaves said. It was the first time she had spoken since I’d laid eyes on her. She was fat, probably middle-aged, but with larger breasts and darker eyes than ‘Tal’. Her mane was well kept and silver in color, which I knew to be a genetic rarity in the Lhassa genome.

I gave her a blank stare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Please.” She rolled her eyes. “I know what you’re up to. His stable’s full. If you think you’re buying yourself a few more years of life by offering yourself to him, you’re wrong. He’ll have you inside a week.”

“Conza!” One of the other feed slaves—younger, prettier—flicked her tail and gave the older slave a withering glance. “Leave her alone!”

I tossed my mane at Conza. “Well, I don’t plan on being eaten.”

“As if it’s up to you!” She snorted. “I know his tastes as well as anybody. I’ve been his slave for almost a full cycle.”

I laughed. “You must not taste very good.” I looked at the other two slaves. They were both watching our exchange carefully, but neither reacted to my little quip. The one who had spoken up for me hugged herself, though not against any external chill—the canyons of Sadura were hot as jungles and just as humid.

“Shut your mouth about things you know nothing about.” Conza snarled.

I smiled. “Same to you.”

The two Dryth returned to the deck. Othrick had a hand scanner, while the other one had his hand on his pistol. Behind them, strutting along on his rear four legs with all the cockiness of a bird doing a mating dance was Tagrod the Balthest. He had shed his clothing, and now moved towards me slowly, his eyes shining. “Just a formality, Tal. I’m afraid Othrick insisted.”

It took Othrick less than a second to find the multipistol. Dryth faces are poorly suited to smiling, but there was a tightness in his eyes and nostrils that indicated some degree of vindication. He seized the pistol and held it up for his Lorca master. The other Dryth drew his weapon and leveled it at me. “An assassin, sir.” Othrick announced. “As I suspected.”

Tagrod frowned at the tiny weapon. He shook his head. “Ah, Tal, I thought you were different.” Tagrod shook his great head.

Othrick tossed my pistol over the side and then grabbed me by the collar. It’s easy sometimes to forget how much muscle is crammed into a Dryth’s compact frame until they lay a hand on you. Othrick dragged me over to the edge of the yacht and probably would have pitched me over with little trouble, had not Tagrod stopped him. “I want to know why.”

I smiled. “The usual reasons. You’re a great, smelly murderous beast with pretentions of civility. It’s almost sad if it weren’t so barbaric.”

Tagrod grinned, but showed his teeth this time. They glittered in the dim light of Sadura’s bioluminescent fungi. “The Lorca are no different than the Lhassa, Tal. We both feed on one another and on those around us, as does everything. The Lhassa have never understood this, which is why they consume whole planets with the ravenous appetites of their many young. We Lorca—we true Lorca—eat you to thin the herd, which benefits all.”

“Except the meals.” I tested Othrick’s grip by struggling a little, but he held me with geological firmness. Without bones, I had no way of leveraging an escape.

Tagrod waved Othrick away from the rail. “You care so deeply for my slaves, but so do I. This may be difficult for you to understand, but I love them. When, at last, I consume them, it will not be a barbaric act. It will be the course of nature—the way of the world. There is beauty in it.”

“Bull shit.” I wished right then I could have spat at him, but I’m not much good at it. All that nonsense about the beauty of nature made me ill. I wanted to grab him by his fat head and make him watch the little kids falling off the cliffs of Sadura. I wanted him to smell the dumpster I slept in as a child, slowly eking out nutrients from the festering remains of long-dead vermin. Screw him and his natural order. The civilized species of the galaxy had conquered it for a reason.

I let this show on my face. Tagrod watched me with the intensity a predator can only muster for prey. “I see you disagree. Come. Let me show you.”

Othrick muscled me close to the big Lorca. I pushed my face into a sneer. “Careful—I might disagree with you.”

The Lorca’s middle limbs reached out and seized me by the legs and waist as easily as if I were a candlestick. “Understand, pretty Tal, that it is you who have made this come about. I wish…” He lost the words and shook his head.

“Just do it already. I’m getting tired of talking to you.”

Tagrod sighed. “I do this out of honor, not pleasure.”

His giant, gaping mouth snapped down over my head faster than I thought possible. The pressure was incredible—were I the real Tal, my skull would have been crushed and my spine snapped in and instant. As it was, I compressed in his mouth like a half-full balloon. I felt the dozens if needle-sharp teeth pierce my outer membranes, each puncture burning with intense pain and weight. I let myself flow around his jaws and pulled myself up and into his mouth as quickly as I could, abandoning my Lhassa form with all the speed and alacrity of deeply-ingrained muscle memory. The great Lorca immediately knew something was wrong. His forelimbs clawed at my amorphous body, but most of me was in his mouth, filling his jaws and throat like a tumor. With a simple internal jerk, I expelled the metabolic poison down his gullet—the poison that the pistol had diverted his guards away from finding.

Tagrod threw himself on his side, still clawing at his own face, but by now the poison was hitting his system. After the fires of adrenaline cooled, his motions became sluggish, erratic, uncoordinated. The Dryth were on top of their master, trying to pry me out. When they were close enough, I let some of myself flow into a pseudopod that pulled Othrick’s pistol from his holster. My aim has never been good, but at that range it didn’t need to be. I set the pistol to shoot slivers and unloaded a burst into Othrick’s forehead and another into the other one’s face. They dropped like the eighty-kilo sacks of meat they were.

When it was all over, I flowed out of Tagrod’s throat and formed myself into Tal again. I saw the big Lorca’s eyes were still open, one eyelid twitching sporadically. I gasped for air and did my best to seal the dozens of little puncture wounds that leaked from my body. Everything hurt. “Dammit, that took a long time.”

“You monster!” Conza darted to her master’s side. “What have you done? You’ve doomed us! You’ve doomed our families!” Her eyes were glassy with tears, “He was generous to me! My children…what will they do?”

I didn’t bother trying to shrug—I was too tired. “I dunno—get jobs?” I checked Othrick’s pistol. Like all Dryth weapons, it was high quality, but needlessly ornate. I weighed the advantages of keeping it with the advantages of pawning it.

“Of course you wouldn’t care, you miserable smack!” Conza spat at me. “What does a pointless, disgusting trash-eating blob know about honor and decorum and…and decency?”

“I gotta admit, lady, not a hell of a lot.” I pointed the multipistol at her, considered shooting her. Before I could make up her mind, she screamed and darted below deck. I could hear her yowling as it shuddered up through the deckplates.

The other two said nothing, still clinging to one another, keeping their distance. “Which one of you is Yvret?”

The youngest one raised her hand. I nodded. “Your Uncle Jainar sends his regards and his love.”

A tear welled in the mare’s eye. “He…he hired you?”

I shrugged. “Guess I was cheaper than the cost to buy you back from the Lorca.” I produced a piece of paper in my hand. “Here is the comms address at which you can reach your uncle. Contact him using the comm on this yacht.”

She stood there, staring at me. “Now?”

“I don’t get paid until you do, so do it now, yes.”

Yvret vanished. This left me alone with the third feed slave—the one who had stood up for me a few minutes earlier. I had seen, though, how she looked at my cousin in the trash bin; she looked at me no differently now. I was some horrible abomination, no matter how I’d saved her. “He treated us well. He was generous to our families.” She said at last. “Conza hadn’t lied about that. I…I think he actually cared for us.”

I spun my Lhassa neck around in an impossible circle, just to creep her out. It worked—she backed away a pace. “I really don’t care. He could have been the long-lost love of your life, saving your pups and atmospherically reconditioning a moon just for all the orphans of Lorcan appetite and I still would have killed him. I don’t owe you miserable bipeds anything. If the Thraad below decks spots me a fiver and I’ll put holes in you, too.”

She blinked at that. “We’re not all bad.”

“You are.” I snarled. “But that’s beside the point. I’m just making a living, and killing people beats the hell out of eating garbage.”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

I laughed in her face. When Yvret got back on deck, I used the comm to confirm the money had been wired to my account, and then ordered the ship to dock at the nearest side cavern. I left without saying goodbye or giving anybody any advice—not my problem. I slunk off into the shadows, reverted to a faceless blob that nobody would give a second glance, and oozed towards home.

I thought about what the third slave had said, but only much later. I was taking the form of a Dryth Diplomat, House Ghaisi colors braided into my uniform, at a private table at the Zaltarrie. There was food—better food than I’d eaten in ages—piled high on warm plates, a Quinixi server hovering over my left shoulder, his palps quivering at the prospect of the tip I’d promised him. I was comfortable, respected, left alone.

I held out a plate of algae noodles. “This food is terrible.”

The Qunixi bobbed and swizzled something in its language that translated as, “I’m terribly sorry sir! I shall take it away!”

I deposited the plate in the arachnid’s fuzzy limbs. “I want you to throw it in the dumpster. Out the service entrance—to the left.”

“Sir?”

“Just do it.”

The server left. I wondered if the Tohrroid would be there or not; I wondered if it mattered one way or the other.

How many reasons does a creature need to do what it does, anyway? I made my body shrug, just for practice. I ate well.

A Revolutionary’s Guide to Practical Conjuration

Galaxy Press in the Writers of the Future Anthology, Volume 31

The man with the crystal eye could peel the skin off a camel with his glare, and Abe struggled to meet it. He did his best to meet the man’s gaze, but couldn’t determine which eye to look at. The crystal one was alien, yes—it glowed with a sort of half-light, as though a candle flickered somewhere in its glassy depths—but for all that it was inanimate. Looking at it felt like gazing at a lantern, and the idea that it peered back was unsettling. The other eye—the man’s human eye—was dark and sharp, like a bird’s, and it didn’t blink as it darted up and down Abe’s body. It wasn’t an improvement over the crystal eye at all. Abe tried to hold still.

“You are not a practitioner of the High Arts.” The man announced finally. He took up the mouthpiece to a water pipe and took several introspective puffs.

Abe glanced over his shoulder reflexively. Nobody in the tooka-den seemed to have noticed the man’s comment. It was late, and the evening shadows were deepened by the sweet, heady smoke that bunched around the ceiling lamps. The other patrons, scattered about on deep pillows and separated by muslin curtains, were too deep into their own smoking to even look up.

“Relax, boy. I would not have chosen this place if it were dangerous.”

“How do I know I can trust you?” Abe asked, hands balled into fists.

The man laughed, his bird eye never wavering from Abe. “You do not. You cannot know—this is life. Please sit…or run. Whatever you do, stop standing like a spooked rabbit.”

The man motioned to a chartreuse cushion across from him, and Abe sat. The cushion practically swallowed his bony frame, pulling his feet off the floor. A sickly sweet perfume—a mixture of tooka smoke and stale sweat—puffed up around him. Abe gagged.

The man with the crystal eye nodded. “Much better. Now for introductions: I am Carlo diCarlo, and you are?”

Abe tried to prop himself upright in the huge cushion, but couldn’t quite manage. “I’d rather not tell you my name.”

Carlo sighed. “Obviously not, but you could make one up. I just did, after all.”

“You did?”

“You didn’t seriously think my name was Carlo diCarlo, did you? Come now, I need something to call you besides ‘boy’. Spit it out.”

Abe spat the first thing that came to mind. “Oz—call me Oz.”

Carlo nodded. “So far, so good. Now, Oz, would you like any refreshment? They don’t serve drinks here, but perhaps some food? Tooka? Ink?”

Abe pulled himself to the edge of the cushion. “I’m no ink-thrall.” He growled.

Carlo puffed his pipe and shrugged. “You didn’t have the look, but you never can tell. It’s only polite to ask.”

“Do you have what I need?” Abe said, putting a hand on his purse.

Carlo shook his head and closed his real eye. The crystal one glowed more brightly. “You aren’t accustomed to having illegal dealings with black marketeers, are you? Never mind—a silly question—of course, you don’t. When I received your message, I assumed you were some Undercity alley wizard looking for an edge, or perhaps an alchemist or thaumaturge looking to expand his business down semi-legal avenues, but I see now that you’re just an angry young man with an axe to grind.”

Abe frowned, trying to fashion his stare into something icy. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

Carlo tapped his crystal eye. “I see a lot more than you realize, Oz. Now, to answer your question: yes, I have what you need. To answer your second question: you cannot afford it.”

Abe tossed his purse on the carpet before Carlo’s feet. It clanked loudly. “There’s 50 marks in silver crowns. I can get more.”

Carlo sighed. “What exactly do you think this peculiar eye of mine does, anyway? I know how much silver you have in that purse—I counted it when you came in. I am telling you that you don’t have enough and that I find it unlikely that any additional amount of money you can secure will be sufficient. You’re out of luck, boy—go home. Honestly, I’m doing you a favor.”

Abe felt his face flush. “I need that book, Carlo. I’ll pay anything.”

“Go home, Oz. Get a job, if you can. I recommend thievery—you appear to be good at it, judging from that robe you are wearing that you clearly couldn’t afford, and all those coins which are not the product of your diligent scrimping. Forget you ever came here and live a much longer, happier life.”

“You don’t understand! My life…all our lives are…” Abe stopped and took a deep breath. “I will pay anything—anything, understand? I need that book.”

Carlo puffed his pipe for a few moments and began to blow smoke sculptures. Birds and serpents swirled out of his mouth and danced with each other in arabesque patterns until they vanished into the cloudy ceiling. It was a simple glamour, nothing more. He supposed Carlo was doing it to prove something, but he didn’t know what. The black marketeer, for his part, simply watched the creatures unfold from his lips in some kind of tooka-induced trance before finally speaking. “Very well, boy, I will make you a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“One you will have to accept, of course. It goes like this: I give you the book, but under a particular condition. In ten days I will find you and, at that time, you will give me two thousand marks in gold .”

Abe stiffened. “That’s impossible! I could never—”

Carlo held up his hand. “You will have the book, remember? Don’t think I am unaware what you wish to do with it; two thousand marks seems a reasonable sum. Now, if you do not have the money in ten days, I will reclaim the book and go on my way. This is the deal.”

“What makes you think you’ll be able to get the book back from me?”

Carlo shrugged. “I strongly believe that you will be dead in ten days, so it should be a relatively simple matter. Do we have a deal?”

“I have a counteroffer.”

“Not interested. This is the deal, take it or leave it.”

“But—”

Carlo’s face narrowed into a glare. “If you are as desperate and angry as you appear, you know as well as I do that you are going to say yes, so stop wasting my time, please. I am running out of patience.”

Abe sighed. “Deal.”

Carlo pointed at the floor. “Spit.”

Abe spat.

The black marketer spat as well, then sighed. “There—was that so hard?”

“The book, Carlo.”

Carlo diCarlo shook his head, muttering about Illini manners, and produced a large, leather-bound book wrapped in string from a belt pouch obviously too small to contain it without sorcerous interference. He extended it towards Abe and Abe snatched it. It was heavy and smelled like mildew and stale air.

Abe fiddled with the knots holding the string around it until Carlo slapped his hand away.

“Fool, boy! Don’t open that here! Do you want the mirror men on us? Go, go—begone! Back to the wretched Undercity with you, understand?”

Abe snatched his hands away from the string and nodded. “Thank you.”

Carlo snorted. “Don’t thank me, Oz. I’ve just killed you.”

“See you in ten days.” Abe shot back. Taking the rejected bag of silver and tucking the book under one arm, he walked into the smoky recesses of the tooka den. When he glanced back, he saw no sign that anyone had been there, let alone anyone named Carlo diCarlo.

The strangest thing to Abe about Illin’s Upper City was the streetlamps. They were ten feet tall and made of iron, their heads glowing with sun-bright crystals the size of large melons. Even now, in the dead of night, they cast sufficient light on the broad, white streets that Abe could read the numbers on the houses from twenty paces away. One of those crystals would fetch enough money to buy a large house in Abe’s neighborhood, yet none of them had been stolen or damaged. Abe found himself glaring at them as he made his way to the public lift terminal. “Lousy toppers.”

As Abe got close to the edge of the Upper City, the houses and businesses gave way to defensive structures—minarets and parapets, trapezoidal barracks, and huge, black war-orbs hovering over pyramidal control loci. A patrol of ten mirror men, their mageglass armor gleaming beneath sunny streetlights, marched toward Abe in perfect formation, their firepikes bobbing and flickering as they reflected their bearer’s even gait.

Clutching the book tightly to his chest, Abe looked at his feet as he shuffled to one side, letting them pass. He felt as if he were glowing somehow—as though their foreign faces were studying him as they went by. He tried to keep his breathing even, but his heart wouldn’t cooperate. It pounded like a war drum, announcing to every part of his body that it could all end here. The mirror men just needed to ask “Say, what’s a scrawny teen doing out alone at this time of night?” He’d be whisked into one of those trapezoid barracks in an instant; no one would ever see him again.

The men didn’t stop, though—just marched past. They were just common soldiers, their sergeant more interested in keeping security than recovering contraband.

Heart still racing, Abe made it to the terminal—a small, colonnaded dome perched on the very edge of the Upper City, overlooking the Undercity beneath and the ocean beyond. A few mirror men gave him a cursory glance before letting him aboard the night lift. The basket, made of wicker, was large enough to carry perhaps four people—much smaller than the daytime gondolas that could haul dozens of people and livestock. Abe tipped the lift man at his winch for a speedy descent, then said goodbye to the white paved streets and well-lit avenues of the toppers’ domain.

The basket plummeted from the edge of the terminal, causing Abe’s stomach to flutter. His tip had been appreciated.

Almost immediately the darkness that blanketed the rest of Illin for most hours of the day swallowed the light of the Upper City. The Undercity was named so literally: it rested directly beneath the Upper City on a flat pan of dry ground in the midst of an endless maze of marshy reeds and slow-flowing estuaries that brought trade and disease from the troubled regions to the south. Though it was twice as large as the Upper City and was home to four times as many people, the Undercity was dark and seemingly deserted. Abe could see only a few fires from his basket—bonfires lit by gangs or religious fanatics or worse, all of whom used the night to gather numbers and strength.

The public lift terminal at the bottom was the vandalized, scorched mirror-image of its wealthier sibling. A group of cheap sellswords in worn black leather and rusty studs were employed to stand guard here, but really spent most of their time dicing and boasting in the guttering candlelight. They didn’t even look up as Abe’s basket landed, which was good. He didn’t have any money to bribe them.

“Did you get it?” Krim’s bony frame separated from a shadow and she fell into step beside Abe. She lit a candle with a match. “Let me see!”

“Not here.” Abe hissed. “I’ll open it at home.”

Krim cuffed him. “Dummy! How’d you know you weren’t cheated if you didn’t open it, eh? You lost our money for nothing, betcha!”

“I’ve got it, don’t worry—see?” Abe held the book up to the candlelight. It looked older and blacker than it had in the tooka den. Though without design or device, something about the cover made his skin crawl.

It seemed to have the same effect on Krim. In the dim light, Abe saw her dark eyes widen. She stepped back and made the sign of Hann on her heart. “I’ll tell the others.”

“Don’t tell them yet. I still don’t know if I can use it.”

Krim scowled. “Don’t give me that! You can read, can’t you? Isn’t that all it takes for books? Monda will bust your ankles if he gave up his purse for nothing.”

“You don’t understand—these things are very compli—”

Krim slapped Abe across the face. “No, you don’t understand, Abrahan Anastasis! We’re counting on you, and you don’t get to let us down, right? You read the book, you work the spells, and we change the world—that’s the deal.”

Abe nodded. “I know, I know. I’m sorry, Krim.”

“Should be. The topper take all fifty?”

“Uh…”

Krim cocked her head. “What’s it?”

Krim was lighter than Abe, but he had no doubts about the danger she posed. He’d seen her cut a throat for a copper. “Yeah, he took all fifty.”

“Somethin’ else?” Krim’s weight shifted to the balls of her feet. Abe saw a hand dart inside her tunic.

Abe shook his head. “No, just the fifty.”

Krim waited, as though sniffing for a lie, and then relaxed. “Fine. Take the book back to your Mama and read or whatever. I’ll call for you tomorrow, take you to see everybody and report, right?”

“Sure.”

Krim vanished into the shadows like a rat darting into a bolt hole. The hairs on Abe’s neck didn’t relax. She was probably still watching him. The rumor was that Krim walked around with a shard of mageglass in her tunic wrapped in leather, sharp enough to cut right through bone. Cut a man’s head open like a barrel-top once, or so Monda said. The image of her with blood on her face, her dark eyes grinning at Abe, kept him up at nights sometimes.

Still, without her and Monda and the rest, he would never have gotten the money and the book. And the book was the key.

In the pitch-black night, the Undercity changed from a confusing tangle of dead ends, alleys, and crumbled ruins into a deadly labyrinth. Abe’s mother talked about how the streets had been clean and lit in the old days, before the war, but when the Kalsaaris had invaded they hadn’t been gentle. The sewers were now filled with imps and lesser demons, the descendants of various weapons of war utilized by both sides during the Kalsaari occupation and subsequent Allied liberation of the city. Parasitic gremlins swarmed through most buildings, eating supports and ruining attempts to rebuild, while more dangerous things—unexploded brymmstones, trapped war-fiends, and worse—lay beneath every pile of rubble. All this, of course, didn’t even include the dangers posed by the desperate survivors—people like Krim, lurking in the dark with a sharp knife and a keen ear for jingling coins.

Tracing a long-memorized route through the rubble in the dark, Abe arrived home. On the front steps, the candles in the small Hannite shrine burned low. Sighing, Abe bowed to it and slipped past to unlock the door and go in.

Before the war, the Anastasis home had been a three-story townhouse squeezed between a bakery and a church. Today the bakery was abandoned, playing home to a rotating cast of squatters and vermin; the church was merely rubble, destroyed by a brymmstone during the initial Kalsaari bombardment. The home itself was now only one story tall, the top having burned when the church was destroyed, and the second story was half collapsed. Abe and his mother used the old sitting room as a makeshift bedroom, had access to the kitchen and the front hall, and stayed out his father’s old office, just in case the ceiling finally collapsed beneath the weight of the rubble upstairs.

Abe took the book into his father’s office. The risk was there, true, but he trusted that if the ceiling hadn’t collapsed in five years, it wouldn’t likely collapse tonight. Also, there was no other place the book could feasibly avoid his mother’s notice. On a cursory glance, if she found it here, she would likely conclude it was just one of his father’s old ledgers or law books and leave it be—that, or command Abe to sell it, which put it safely back in his own hands. His mother couldn’t sell his father’s books without weeping.

Abe lit the only oil lamp his family had left and sat behind his father’s hulking desk. Even atop its broad, bare expanse, the book looked menacing—a kind of curse made thick and dark and physical, like a clot of congealed blood. Licking his lips, Abe untied the strings and pulled back the cover.

The book sprang open and flipped itself to a random page, somewhere in the middle. Every available space on the yellowed pages was filled with a cramped, meticulous handwriting in deep maroon ink. Abe tried to turn back to the beginning, but every time he flipped a page, the page flipped back. Finally, growing frustrated at the enchantment (was this some kind of security feature? Perhaps…) he settled down to read.

If you are reading this, stop! You are unqualified to use this book, and any attempt to utilize its lore will inevitably end in serious injury, death, or worse. Return this volume at once to its place of origin.

Abe blinked—what a peculiar thing to say in the middle of a book. He pressed on.

Since you are still reading, the text said, it is evident the above warning was insufficient to dissuade you from your self-destructive course. You are to be simultaneously scolded for your recklessness and commended on your bravery. Consider yourself both as of this moment.

Abe grinned. A book with a sense of humor was not what he had expected. He skimmed the next paragraph but found the handwriting difficult to read without focusing, so had to go back to the beginning again.

If you expect to be able to skip ahead or skim your way to an understanding of the art of conjuration in a short time, it is evident that you are a fool and that, again, it must be stressed that your death is almost guaranteed. You are advised for a second and final time to close this book and get rid of it.

Abe sat back, eyes narrowing, and read the paragraph again. Was it…could a book be aware of him? Was that possible? “Are you alive?” he asked aloud, and then kept reading.

As has been implied, this book is an instructional manual designed to assist the experienced practitioners of the High Arts to gain facility in the art of conjuration in a relatively short period of time. As you are inexperienced in all magecraft, however, it would be advisable for instruction to begin at the essential basics of magical instruction, since without these it is unlikely you will be able to conjure anything at all except, perhaps, a splitting headache. Tonight will involve an overview of what’ magic’ is, exactly, since that is both the most important topic to understand and the only topic simple enough to outline before your mother wakes up.

Abe’s finger shot back from the line he was reading, his eyes wide. He slammed the book closed. “What the…what the hell?”

The house creaked above as his mother’s bare feet touched the floor in the one useable room upstairs. Her reedy voice trickled through the dark. “Abe, dear, is that you?

Abe backed away from the book, staring at it as though it might leap off the desk. He remembered what the old smuggler had said: “Don’t thank me, Oz. I’ve just killed you.”

Gods, he thought, was he right?

Abe’s mother insisted on fixing him something to eat, despite how late it was and the paucity of their stores. She wiped the very last vestiges of some sour grape jam from an old, crusty jar and scraped them over stale crackers. Once she had laid it before her son, she blew out the candle. They sat together in the dark. Abe didn’t eat.

“No sense wasting the food.” His mother said. There was no fight in her voice, though, no sense of warning or caution or even admonishment. She said things by rote these days, Abe knew. What was the difference if they wasted food, anyway? They were going to starve sooner or later.

“I’m sorry I’m so late. I was busy.” Abe said, picking up a cracker and dipping it in a warm cup of water to soften it a bit.

“Did you earn any money?” she squeaked.

Abe wanted to tell her about the fifty silver coins still under his stolen robe, but he didn’t. That money couldn’t be spent without Krim and Monda finding out, and that would mean a grisly death for both of them. Besides, if he dropped it on the table, his mother would know he’d fallen in with thieves. That would be the end of her, he guessed.

She waited for an answer, so he cleared his throat. “No…nothing today. No ships new in town, so nobody needed a copyist.”

“Mmmm…” Abe’s mother tsked between her teeth. “Forgetting all about us, they are. They used to clog the harbor, you know. Your father wrote the contracts to a hundred different ships every year; he wore a gold chain about his neck, and when he walked down the street…”

Abe could recite what followed by heart. His mother, conjuring images of a past so far gone he wasn’t really sure it had ever existed. How every house had a sunstone they’d set out to soak during the brief daylight and then use it all the night to light their streets. A city of light and life and happiness—all that drivel. She blamed the Kalsaaris, of course, and Illin’s western allies who were so quick to row back home once the city was ‘liberated,’ and the mirror men—the ‘Defenders of the Balance’—who had been left behind to clean up the mess. She didn’t speak a word about the toppers, though, or the Prince and his Black Guard, or the thousand thieves and thugs and sellswords who prowled the Undercity, leeching off the dying corpse of Illin.

He used to argue with her, tell her they should do something about it, how they could work together to fix the city. How someday he could learn sorcery at the foot of a great mage and fix the broken streets of the Undercity with a wave of his hand. The arguments used to carry on for hours, his mother’s voice growing steadily weaker in the face of Abe’s anger. He didn’t bother yelling anymore, though. Now all he did was listen.

When, at last, she’d gone to bed, Abe crept back into the ruined office and opened the book. It picked up right where it had left off.

Magic, as you probably are unaware, is governed by five elemental forces. In ancient times, people misinterpreted these forces and associated them with the so-called ‘elements’—Fire, Water, Air, and Earth—and had no idea of the existence of a fifth. These people were primitives and superstitious fools, and you should take care not to follow their example. Magic is far more complicated than that.

The five energies are the Lumen and the Ether, the Dweomer and the Fey, and the Astral…

Abe yawned. When were they going to get to something practical? He kept on.

If you are growing tired, perhaps you ought to take a rest and come back another time. The study of magic is extremely taxing, both physically and mentally, and it would be a waste of your effort to attempt to master it while fatigued.

Abe sat up straighter. “You…you are alive. You can see me!”

Every use of these energies, known colloquially as ‘magic’ or ‘sorcery’, but more accurately as the High Arts (as distinguished from the Low Arts), involves the use of three elements.

“No!” Abe hissed into the pages, taking care not to make so much noise as to wake his mother. “I want to talk with you, book! I want you to explain some things to me.”

The first of these elements is the energy to be drawn from the world surrounding you, known as the ‘ley.’ The second element is the incantation by which the energy is drawn, known occasionally as the spell or ritual. The third of these elements is the focus, or the physical entity through which the energy is to be channeled by the incantation. In the case of a spell, this is the sorcerer him or herself; in the case of the ritual, it is through the object used to channel the power. (1)

Abe frowned, and referred to the footnote. It read: 1) Pay attention, you insufferable little ragamuffin. This book is not in your possession to chit-chat, but rather to instruct you as a master teacher might a dull-witted pupil. You aren’t even taking notes, so the likelihood that lessons will have to be repeated grows with each passing instant, and this narrative thread is already boring beyond description.

Sitting back, Abe scowled. “Maybe I won’t read you, then. How about that?”

Glancing back at the page, the book had not responded. It continued to drone on and on about magical energies, incantational postures, and channeling techniques. He read it as long as he could keep his eyes open, then dragged himself upstairs to sleep on the threadbare pallet besides his mother. He dreamed of Carlo’s crystal eye, following him through the tangled ruins of the Undercity, the book clutched in his bloodstained hands.

The next morning, Abe woke late. The thinnest rays of sunshine were still slipping past the rim of the Upper City, casting just enough light through the gaping holes in the roof that Abe could see that his mother was awake. He guessed that he would find her out front, praying to the shrine while the light still held. It was a common practice among the widows of Illin, especially since the Kalsaaris had burned most of the churches during the occupation and the toppers had yet to secure funds to repair them. Abe’s own mother refused to walk the mile to the nearest functional church, claiming that the women there lived too close to the docks to be of ‘clean reputation.’

When Abe stumbled downstairs, however, he didn’t find his mother out front praying, but rather sitting in his father’s office, the big black book of magic open across her knees. “Mother! What are you doing?”

She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Just looking through some of your father’s old books. You know, I never knew he had a cookbook before.”

Abe felt as if his mouth were unable to form words. “Cook…book?”

She shrugged weakly. “Funny, really, that I should find it now that we haven’t any food. Well, I’m off to the market. They say some mirror men will be passing out bolts of cloth later and the moths have been at the quilt again. Winter is never too far away, you know.”

Abe watched her leave, wordless. When the door closed, he tore open the spellbook.

It is strongly advised that this book not fall into the hands of individuals even less talented than yourself, as their piggish, ignorant eyes are harmful to this book’s contents.

“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” Abe growled.

The exact nature or relationship of the stupendous ignorami permitted to flap about these pages is immaterial to the original warning. This advice ought to be heeded, as the consequences are apt to be most dire.

“Now you’re threatening me? Well, what if I toss you in a fire, huh? What about that?”

Furthermore, it is strongly suggested that no vandalism be done to this book, as its contents are too valuable to you, the reader, as well as to the world in general. However, given the vagaries of human free will, no action can or will be taken to prevent the destruction of this volume should it be deemed essential by the owner.

“Let’s just say I won’t find it essential if you leave off insulting my mother—how about that?”

Apparently satisfied, the book broke into more tedious magical instruction. To continue with our lessons from the previous chapter, let us begin by explaining the nature of conjuration itself.

Abe spent the rest of the day reading, huddled by the lantern, trying to glean some practical knowledge of how to conjure what he would need to in order to impress Mondo and Krim and the rest of the band. All he got was general information—history, basic theory, simple exercises and drills, but not a word about a single spell. He couldn’t even conjure an ounce of gold or a thimble of water—he didn’t even know where to begin. He couldn’t skip ahead, he couldn’t skim to find the good parts; he was a slave to the book’s slow, methodical prose.

He had only ten days to get Carlo his money? It was impossible. He didn’t know the first thing about what he was doing, and the damned book was no help. What could he do? What would he say to the gang?

Finally, during the brief period of light as the sun passed from its hiding place behind the Upper City to its hiding place behind the edge of the world, Abe came across something potentially useful. The book was talking about the uses of advanced conjuration, and it finished with a discussion of what it termed ‘pure beings’.

Pure beings, or ‘Spirits,’ as they are sometimes known, are creatures of a particular pure energy type that, so far as arcane theory is concerned, exist in planes of origin parallel to our own where only one pure energy is in abundance. These beings have a myriad of applications, the most obvious being the war fiends conjured to assault enemy positions. Those specific entities are pure fey energy and, as such, are well suited to the vagaries of war and destruction (though they are disinclined to take orders). Accordingly, a wide variety of daemons and djinns, angels and fiends that are used by sorcerers to accomplish tasks that would, otherwise, have to be executed by human beings. These spirits sometimes manifest themselves in obvious ways, but can also be found trapped within mundane objects.

Abe blinked at the words, and then read them a second time. “You mean…like in books? Are you saying that you are some kind of spirit trapped inside this book?”

Looking back at the page, only one sentence could be clearly resolved, burning prominently in the center of the page, like a subtitle:

You’re finally learning something.

Krim found Abe just as true night fell. As usual, she slipped inside the house unnoticed. In the few months she had been coming to the house, Abe doubted his mother had ever laid eyes on her. This suited him fine; Krim wasn’t fit to meet his mother.

“You ready?” She sat across from Abe in his father’s old, dusty chair. She put her feet up on the desk. “Learned any good spells yet?”

Abe took a deep breath. There was a right answer and a wrong answer here; he picked the right one. “A little bit.”

“Good. Monda is pissed a stupid book cost all fifty. C’mon.” She sprung lightly to her feet and cocked her head, waiting.

Abe stood, suddenly aware of how tired he felt. The room spun a little as the blood equalized in his head. He slid the magic book into a knapsack and threw it over one shoulder. “I’m coming—just don’t get too far ahead, okay?”

Krim’s big dark eyes twinkled in the lantern light. “What’s a matter, schoolboy? Worried somebody might steal your homework?”

Abe grimaced but didn’t speak. The answer, though, was ‘yes.’

The Brotherhood of Light, as Monda’s group called itself, met, ironically, in the very darkest part of the Undercity, almost directly beneath the center of the Upper City’s crescent-shaped foundation. The Spire of Dreams, the great tower that had once connected Upper- to Undercity, lay crumpled like an abandoned ball gown across the blocks of ruined shops, burned-out homes, and crumbling government buildings. Blocks of violet marble the size of fishing boats, once inlaid with gems and inscribed with the names and faces of ancient Illini princes, sat like upended jewelry boxes in the midst of the devastated streets. Those jewels that had not been lost when the Defenders cast down the Spire had long since been pried away by thieves, and the names and faces of that long line of princes were now cracked, smashed, and otherwise defaced.

The Spire of Dreams’ death was a literal representation of the death of old Illin, a fact which hadn’t escaped Monda and his pack of thugs. Their meetings were held in an old antechamber of that fallen citadel, tipped sideways and sagging with the weight of all that stone, and yet still standing. Abe sometimes wondered how far it had fallen and how it had managed to stay intact. He wasn’t wondering that now, however—there were too many eyes upon him. Angry, violent, expectant eyes, lit by greasy orange torchlight.

Two such eyes were burrowed deep in the haggard creases of Monda’s face. All Abe knew about the man’s past was that he had been in the war and, supposedly, served at the side of Prince Landar the Holy. Everybody believed it, but Abe didn’t. There was nothing holy about Monda. He was earthy and feral, like a warthog, and just about as hairy. When he spoke, it was always in quick, clipped syllables, as though talking was a waste of his time. “Well, boy? Report.”

Everyone waited. They were a haggard bunch, most either as young as Abe or older than Monda, but every one had a knife or a rusty bit of sword or a weathered crossbow. Abe needed to give them something to be satisfied with, or he wouldn’t walk out of this meeting. “Well…uhhh…it’s been slow-going.”

“You’ve had all day.” Monda folded his scarred arms across the bushy black forest of chest hair that poked through his open vest.

Abe licked his lips. Krim was just behind him, her breathing even but quick, like someone preparing for the start of a race.

“It’s more complicated than I thought.”

“He said he’d learned a spell.” Krim said.

The assembly exchanged glances and muttered in excitement. Monda quieted them with a jerk of his hand. “Do the spell, boy.”

Abe’s mouth went dry. He looked at Krim, and she must have read his expression. “I’m helping you out, Abe. Give ’em something, right?”

Monda stepped aside and motioned to an open space at the center of the fallen chamber where a flaming brazier belched a thick fume of incinerated camel dung and scrap wood. Abe stepped forward, their eyes boring into him. How many times would he be stabbed, he wondered, if he couldn’t convince them he’d taken their money wisely? Would they return his body to his mother, or would it be just another son who never came home?

“Do the spell.” Monda repeated, putting his hands on his hips. “Now.”

Abe cleared his throat and opened the book. “Just give me a second—I’ve got to find it.”

He looked inside.

Frequently practitioners of the High Arts find themselves placed in awkward positions vis-à-vis the common population. In instances where mobs of slobbering thugs and half-witted cutpurses wish to be given a show to demonstrate one’s power, conjuration is a very useful and successful discipline to employ.

Sweat ran down Abe’s brow. He flipped the page.

Unfortunately for yourself, even the most basic conjurations require months of training to accomplish with regular success, and years to master; as hitherto mentioned, the study of the High Arts is not an easy one, nor is it quick.

“Well?” Monda’s thick eyebrows lowered over his eyes like a pair of bristling window shades.

“Just a second!” Abe said, flipping another page.

The book read: What exactly did you expect? Did you honestly think you could open some book of magic spells and just make one happen, like baking a cake or something? Did you expect to be conjuring buckets of gold for local orphanages by lunch? Restoring infrastructre with a word by sundown? You’ll need weeks more training before we can even get you to channel energies consistently.

“You’ve got to give me something.” Abe hissed at the book. “Anything!”

“What?” Monda looked around at the assembled. “What did he say?”

“He’s talking to himself.” Krim offered. “He was doing that when I found him.”

Abe wiped sweat from his eyes, hands shaking. He flipped another page.

There is only one way in which an inexperienced sorcerer can expect to execute magical spells of sufficient strength to impress dullards and fools. This process, while discouraged by most in the sorcerous field as overly risky, involves establishing an accord with a spirit in exchange for a favor. The most practical variety of spirit to be utilized in this fashion are the creatures of the Ether, also known as ‘ghul’ by the Kalsaaris. Well known for their intelligence and creativity, as well as their basic avarice, they are eager to deal and useful servants.

Monda’s hand fell on Abe’s arm like an iron manacle. He yanked the book from Abe’s hand. “Can you cast the spell or not, boy?”

Abe nodded. “Uhhh…yes, yes—I can. Just, can I have my book back, I need to—“Your book?” Monda pushed Abe to the ground. “This book belongs to the Brotherhood of Light, boy. It was their money that bought it, their blood that was spilled to earn that silver. We gave it to you because Krim vouched for you, said you could read, and were a good, loyal son of Illin. Said you would work a spell to kill the mirror men, topple the Upper City, kill the thieves that feed on us.”

Abe rose slowly, eyes fixed on the book. “I do hate the toppers; I hate them as much as anyone.”

Monda threw him the book. “Work a spell. Show us we haven’t wasted our money. I want to see what you can conjure, boy, and it better be good.” The assembled Brothers nodded solemnly.

Abe opened the tome, hands shaking. There, in a flowing, red script, were the words:

Shall we make a deal, then?

Abe took a long, slow breath. This was what Carlo was talking about—it had to be. He was in over his head, and there was only one way out—a way he knew was wrong. Still, what choice did he have? He looked at the words, nodded and flipped the page.

There, covering both pages of the book, was a detailed contract, indicating how the book would assist him and the price it would demand. At the bottom, beside his name printed in the same maroon ink, were the words “Sign Here.”

“I’m running out of patience, boy.” Monda growled.

Abe, throat dry, dragged out his words in barely audible croaks. “I need a pen and some ink.”

Monda cocked his head. “What?”

“I’ll get it.” Krim darted into the shadows. Oddly, Abe found himself missing her presence. She was the closest thing he had to an ally here.

Monda pushed Abe by the shoulder, like a bully jostling a child around a schoolyard, “Why a pen and ink?”

Abe squared his shoulders and tried looking Monda in the eye. All he saw there was suspicion, pure and icy as the winter sea. Abe tore his gaze away and looked back at the contract. “I need one for the spell.”

“What’s the spell do?”

Abe buried himself in the complex language of the contract, remembering what his mother had always said about his father and legal documents—‘He always read every word—every word—and that made him the best.’

The ghul offered to destroy Abe’s enemies in exchange for…for…

“Well, boy, I asked you a question!” Monda pushed Abe again, but Abe didn’t notice. He was trying to parse the sentence: In exchange for the services detailed herein to be completed by the signee, as defined above, the signer shall relinquish whatsoever claim, be it legal, emotional, physical, or mystical, he has heretofore established with the flesh whose reproductive proclivities led to his issuance in this time and place and transfer that claim to the signee immediately upon completion of said services.

It took him another moment before he had it figured. When he finally had it, he felt as though he had just been punched in the gut.

The ghul wanted his mother.

“Got the pen.” Krim announced, handing over a filthy quill and a greasy bottle of blue ink. “Get on with it.”

Abe looked up at her, barely noticing as she backed away. They were all backing away—all except Monda. “I’d better see some magic, boy.”

The pen felt hard and prickly in his hand as it hovered over the line. He could save himself or save his mother—the choice was his to make, right now. He knew what Hann would want him to do, and Prince Landar, but it was a hard choice. It was especially hard as it was different from what his mother would want. She hadn’t suffered so much and so long to see her son murdered because his anger led him to this dark place surrounded by these dark men. If he died now, what difference would it make? Would his mother want to live without him?

“Let’s have it, boy!” Monda snapped, drawing his knife.

Abe signed. The letters glowed and then erased themselves, as though unwritten—only Abe’s signature remained. It was the only thing, he realized, written with real ink. He looked up at Monda, heart quivering in his chest, mouth dry as sand, palms sweaty. “You got it, Monda.”

The torches darkened, dwindling to little more than flickers. The air grew stale somehow, as though robbed of its lightness and motion by…something. Something black and amorphous, crouching like a pile of black velvet in the center of the chamber. It had one, solitary eye—green and glassy, with a slit-pupil that rapidly scanned the assembly.

Monda stepped toward Abe, eyes wide. “What…what’s that?”

Abe didn’t say anything—he, too, was backing up, along with everyone else. The ghul grew from a squat pile to a pillar of pure darkness, twice as tall as a man. The cloying air was pierced by its laughter—dry and dead as leaves in the wind. “So…like to pick on studious young men, do we?”

“Treachery!” Monda snarled, and hurled himself at Abe, knife raised.

Abe put up his arms to defend himself, falling back onto the floor, but Monda’s blow never struck home.

When Abe looked up, he saw leathery black tendrils wrapped around Monda’s chest and arms. The ringleader’s face froze in an expression of horror and shock, the color somehow leeching from his skin, his body hair sloughing off like so much ash. He opened his mouth to say something—a curse, a scream for help, a call to arms, Abe never knew—before the tendrils pulled him back into the black pillar of the demon’s body and Monda vanished forever.

The Brotherhood of Light turned and fled in all directions at once, their half-dead torches dropped and forgotten. The ghul’s glassy green eye followed where they went and then fixed itself upon Abe. “This will only take a moment.”

The ghul collapsed into a pool of shadow and flitted from the chamber as quick as blinking. In the darkness surrounding the fallen antechamber, Abe heard a chorus of screams rise from the tangled ruins of the Undercity.

Abe didn’t wait for the creature to return—he scooped up the empty book and ran for his life, shooting through narrow alleys and ducking beneath half-collapsed buildings in the utter dark, tripping and stumbling, until he finally reached home. He didn’t know how long it would take the ghul to find and kill everyone in the Brotherhood, but he doubted it would be long. He burst in the door, panting and out of breath, spots dancing in his eyes. “Mother! Mother!”

“In here.” The voice didn’t belong to Abe’s mother—it was Krim’s.

He raced into the parlor. Krim knelt on his mother’s back, the glittering mageglass shard in her hand, pressed to the back of the old woman’s head. Her other hand held a fistful of Abe’s mother’s hair, pulling her head up. Tears mixed with blood ran down his mother’s face. Abe knelt in front of them. “No! Let her go!”

Krim’s big black eyes were wild. “Call it off, first. Call the creature off!”

“Abe, dear…wha…what’s happening . . ?”

Krim smashed his mother’s face into the floor. “Shut up, bitch!” Abe noticed strange, gray wounds along Krim’s spindly arms—she had barely escaped. “Call it off, Abe, or the old lady gets hers.”

Abe shook his head. “You don’t understand—I don’t have a choice. I can’t call it off!”

Krim flicked her wrist, and a blood-red ribbon of flesh was stripped off his mother’s cheek. She shrieked in pain. Abe felt jolts of electricity shoot down his spine, but remained still. “Figure out a way, schoolboy, or after I finish her, I come for you.”

Abe’s hands balled into fists. “If you want me, leave my mother out of it!”

Krim snorted. “Noble talk, schoolboy, but you’re no better than me.”

“Is this what a daughter of Illin does to her own?” Abe scanned the room for a weapon—nothing. He wouldn’t even have known how to use one if he found one.

“Do you really believe that crap, huh?” Krim laughed. “It’s all nonsense, Abe—fairy stories. This is a dead city and we’re the maggots. Maggots don’t get to care what they feed on. Get it?”

“That can change!” Abe scooted closer, but Krim pressed the knife to his blubbering mother’s throat. “With the…the book, I can change all that! I can force the mirror men to listen!”

Krim shook her head. “Poor little schoolboy, still buying into the Big Dream. Don’t make me lau…”

Krim whooshed up through the ceiling with a sudden jerk. Abe glanced up to see the big green eye staring down from the gap in the roof. He heard Krim swear once, then scream, then a second later her polished bones fell to the floor.

Abe’s mother, who had dragged herself upright, saw them hit and fainted dead away.

“Time to collect my payment, Abrahann Anastasis.” The ghul announced with a hissing chuckle.

Abe stood between his mother and the creature. “No, it isn’t.”

“You read the contract—you know the bargain. You aren’t going back on your word, are you?” It said, sliding down through the ceiling like heavy smoke, the lime-colored eye scanning his face.

Abe took a deep breath. “No, you are.”

It stopped. “What? Nonsense.”

“The contract calls for you to destroy my enemies, but you haven’t done that yet.”

A leathery tendril referenced Krim’s skeleton. “This was the last of the so-called Brotherhood.”

“They aren’t my only enemies.” Abe said. “You haven’t destroyed the mirror men. When you’re done with them, you need to go after the war profiteers and the collaborators and the traitors to Prince Landar’s memory.”

“If you insist…”

Abe raised his voice. “Then you need to fix the roads that destroy commerce. You need to repair the aqueducts that pollute our drinking water and do away with the barren farmland that keeps us hungry. You need to rebuild the ruined schools that keep us bereft of knowledge, and the ruined churches that destroy our faith. It won’t be until the sun shines again in Undercity that you, demon, can be said to have destroyed my enemies. Can you do all that?”

The ghul’s green eye turned yellow, then red. “This is…this is preposterous. There was no indication that your ‘enemies’ were to be metaphorical and…”

Abe pointed directly at the eye. “Then you should have included that stipulation in the contract. You didn’t, did you?”

Dead silence. Abe’s heart pounded—he felt as if he might drop dead right there, just from terror. One flick of those horrible tendrils, and he’d be only bones. At last, however, the ghul seemed to sag down to the floor. “What are you, boy? How can you have beaten me?”

“My father was a lawyer.” Abe held out the spellbook. “You are in breach of contract—back in the book with you.”

And, in the twinkling of an eye, the ghul was gone.

Seven days later, Abe deposited a wheelbarrow full of bones at a post where the mirror men paid bounties on wanted criminals. It took them a few auguries to verify that the bones belonged to twenty-eight wanted murderers, thieves, and terrorists. They didn’t ask too many prying questions, paid him in gold, and sent him away.

The next day, Carlo diCarlo appeared at his door. Abe invited him inside, but the smuggler shook his head. “So, you made it, did you? I see you have my money.”

Abe kicked the heavy strongbox of gold in Carlo’s direction. He also held out the book. “I don’t want this anymore.”

Carlo looked at it and chuckled. “Neither do I. The damned thing is more trouble than it’s worth.”

Abe gazed down at it—he hadn’t dared to open it since the incident. The thought of those words swirling across the page had practically put him off books altogether. “What am I supposed to do with it, then?”

Carlo leaned over, a smirk on his face. “If you want my advice, I’d sell it to some idiot for a king’s ransom.”

Abe shook his head. “That’s a death sentence.”

Carlo scooped the strongbox up under one arm and began to stroll away. “That’s funny, Oz—I once thought the very same thing.”