Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology Read online

  Half a dozen times Jak came within inches of death. He leapt small gorges where the melt-water tumbled to the valley below. He sprinted on crumbled edges, high above jagged rock. Once, after a stumble, he thanked the Makers for watching over him.

  “But they didn't make us.” He only mouthed the words, he had no breath for speaking.

  The sun burned crimson just above the lake by the time Jak reached the woods. He caught glimpses of the water through the trees as he ran. It looked like blood.

  Close by the clearing he forced himself to stop and find his wind. It took forever. Quiet as quiet he crept toward the Maker and his guards.

  “Run. I'm telling you, run. Your legs ain't broke. We'll say you escaped.” Jak recognized Hender's voice. He sounded close to tears.

  “If I run, I deny my words,” the Maker answered. He sounded kindly, like tutor Borse explaining to the little ones why two plus two doesn't make five.

  The priests found out about the 'secret tutor' two summers ago, and he never came back to the farms.

  “Run anyway,” Greyton said. “They're going to burn you.”

  “They will,” said the Maker. “And if I had made them - would I not unmake them, to stop their fire?”

  “We believe you already, Oros,” Hender said. “You don't have to die to prove it.”

  Jak edged closer, through the laurel, brushing the leaves aside. The Maker sat propped against a large pine-oak, thicker than the ones he had broken in his fall. His wings, white splashed with scarlet, lay in ruin around him.

  “I don't have to die, but die I will, if that is the required proof. The truth I have planted is a single seed in a forest of lies. It may be that I must water it with my blood.” The Maker sighed and closed his eyes.

  “No.” Jak pulled free of the laurel bushes. “There must be another way.” He felt the tears roll down his cheeks, salty on his lips.

  “Jak!” Hender moved toward him.

  “Oh hell! Roth will be heading back now,” Greyton said.

  Oros opened his eyes. “There is another way,” he said. “A hard way.”

  The two men turned toward him. “What must we do, Oros?” Greyton asked.

  Jak wondered at Greyton. He'd always known Hender was a good man, someone to run to. But Greyton? Oros had woken something in the man.

  “Not you,” Oros said. “The boy.”

  “I'll do it,” Jak said.

  The Maker shook his head. “It's a hard path. A high price. If I could fly back to the Heavens. If I could take my place again, before your priest. Then the truth of my words would be sealed.”

  “But your wings…” Hender said.

  “May be healed,” Oros replied. “It would take a Gift though. It would take sixty years. And only one here has sixty years to give.”

  “No!” Hender and Greyton said it together.

  The Maker raised one hand, large as a shield. The men's voices grew dim, the sounds of the forest fell to nothing. “Jak?”

  Sixty years? I'd be ancient. Old as priest Roth. I'd be an old man. But we'd be free.

  “Yes,” Jak said.

  Oros leaned forward, his muscles corded. “It needs more than a word, Jak. You have to mean it. You have to mean it body and soul. Will you give me your youth, freely?” His molten gaze felt hot on Jak's skin now.

  “For the truth,” Jak said.

  Oros sighed and fell back, somehow shrunken. “Put your hands on my chest.”

  A distant crashing reached Jak. Men running through the undergrowth. Priest Roth and the others!

  Jak hesitated. I'll be old. He thought of Borse, the secret tutor. He was an old man. An old man who cared enough to teach the children. The priests took Borse from them, with his truths. The sound of tearing bushes and cracking branches grew louder, reaching him even through the blanket of silence.

  “Jakimo!” You must have dreamed it. Burn the lie.

  He thought of the Silenced. And he reached out.

  The Maker's flesh seethed beneath his palms. Golden eyes turned red as the sunset waters. Red as blood. For a moment Oros looked gaunt, a feral cast to his features. Jak held his hands there, though the pain seared into him.

  And, from one heartbeat to the next, Oros stood whole. Golden and glorious. No gentle healing, just suddenly complete, pure white wings spread wide.

  “No! Jak!” Hender's shouts filled his ears.

  Jak looked at his hands. They were the same. He touched his face. Unmarked.

  “You said…sixty years?” he whispered.

  “I need the Gift, Jak.” The deep voice folded him in honey. “I needed the act, not the sacrifice.”

  The Maker smiled at Jak, and the shadows of dusk lit like day. With a single beat of his wings, the Maker took to the sky. Jak turned to see the priest, standing open-mouthed. Behind Roth stood father, Dain, and the rest of the men, their faces golden with reflected light. The seed of truth would flower now. The secret would be known.

  You're with me still, Oros' voice rang in Jak's head. Because you gave the Gift.

  And Jak was. He closed his eyes and saw what the Maker saw. He soared above the woods, above the lake, lit by the last glimmer of a dying sun.

  You found a way to fly, Jak. You found a way to fly.

  They stood in silence and watched as Oros dwindled to a golden point and became lost in the clouds. Jak's visions of flying faded; the connection frayed.

  He felt a warm hand on his shoulder. “Come on home, lad.”

  Father led him away, not waiting for the priest's leave. Dain followed, almost dancing. “Did you see? Did you see him fly?”

  Hender walked along behind, grinning from ear to ear. “They didn't make us. Now ain't that a thing.” He drew level with Jak's father. “I've a mind to build that seed-drill you know. I'm sure it would work, no matter what old Rothy and his lot say…”

  They climbed the slope in darkness, until the moon rose to hint the way.

  As they reached the pass, Jak heard a whisper at the back of his mind. The faintest ghost of Oros' voice, and another, fainter still.

  “Welcome back. It is done?”

  “Yes,” said Oros.

  “You broke the only law?”

  “I did,” said Oros. “I broke the truth.”

  “You told Man we did not make him?”

  Oros sighed. “With a lie, I set them free.”

  Shadow Dust

  J.M. Martin

  THE GUARDS ADMITTED the servitor into the mess hall. He was a bald man lacking feeling, bereft of spirit, tall and lean and hook-faced. Shay knew him as First Deputy Hawthorne, one of the Technocrat's faithful couriers, and Shay watched as Hawthorne wordlessly handed the floor sergeant a slip of brown parchment. The sergeant unfolded it, nodded, nodded again to the station keeper up on the mezzanine. The keeper nodded in reply and stepped out of sight, returned a half-minute later with a phosphor-tipped activator rod.

  Shay stopped chewing the all but elastic wurst-meat. He held it in his cheek as he looked up, watched stone-faced as his gaze tracked the keeper to the gaslight array. The rod's tip flared white hot. The keeper extended it, and one of the lamps shone with a blue flame; the rest remained unlit.

  The floor sergeant bellowed, “New York! You're up. Ten minutes to Depot Twenty-Three!”

  Shay finished grinding the gristle with his molars, swallowed, and swigged some brackish water from his flask. He didn't show even an echo of emotion from being called to duty. Nothing. He knew Hawthorne was watching and, therefore, so was the Technocrat.

  #

  Mogg and Esme arrived ahead of him. He watched them go in together. They were always together. Shay was certain if they weren't part of the Bloc's best ternion, the Unis would have separated them by now.

  Shay, of course, wasn't even from New York. That's just where he'd been picked up as a kid. In the aftermath. After the devastation, when everything and everyone in the world died, except for a few thousand who somehow made it to Chrysalis.

  S
hay didn't remember too much of it. He'd been seven when the unrest began, when gods and monsters overran the Earth and brought the magic with them. It didn't matter now. What happened. The past. Parents he barely got to know. All he knew was when the carnage started they packed up and fled. And died. And Shay kept to the shadows of the ruins of NYC until Unitech militia swept through. Shay had pretty much lost track of time by then. He figured he was probably ten, maybe older when the Unis took him to Chrysalis and delivered him to the Bloc.

  Deputy Hawthorne was waiting inside the depot and he launched into a quick debriefing without hesitation. Another snatch/grab. Shay looked askance at Mogg. Big, bald, black. Attired in a white trench and shifting in his large leather boots. He wasn't the biggest Shay had seen, but pretty damned near. Shay could tell he was perturbed. Mogg was an Extractor. A wet boy. A true HK. He was Mogg the Dog, a bloodhound to the core, and his itinerary was up close and always personal.

  Used to be 'take no prisoners' was the hard rule back in the day, but lately ternions had been charged with bringing grubs back to the Bloc. One night a few months ago Shay had spied a Uni transport team escorting three grubs from A to B. The lead Uni led them with a tether, and they were restrained by their necks, bound together by a type of pillory. What struck Shay most was their physical state; each of them, from their necks up, looked drained of life, hair brittle, cheeks and eyes sunken, flesh like chalk, their witchmarks all but invisible.

  Shay wasn't sure how to feel about it. In Chrysalis, feeling was a luxury he could not afford.

  After Hawthorne was finished droning he flicked their order packets from his coat, set them on the counter, and left without so much as a 'good luck' or an 'up yours.'

  The quartermaster slid their duffels across the counter. Uni-approved gear, selected by Command Authority.

  “Never thought about it before, but isn't calling them spec goggles kinda redundant?”

  It was Esme, fishing through her bag. She'd already donned the blackened brass and leather goggles, wearing them atop her shock of spiky orange-dyed hair.

  Shay ignored the question, lifted his harness—a body-fitted, collapsible rig—from his duffel, and donned it over his head on the outside of his padded leather coat.

  “What do you mean 'redundant'?” Mogg had his goggles on, adjusted the clockwork dial so his lenses clacked from azure to chromatic jade to finally a lightproof vermilion.

  “Spec goggles. Like, spectacles means glasses or goggles already, right?” Esme said.

  Mogg lifted his goggles, placed them atop his bald head. He made a deep, rather dismissive hmmm and nodded as he pulled out his own harness. He checked a wing, opening the steel web-like framework, inspecting the silk and canvas membrane.

  “It's short for spectral, not spectacles,” Shay said, then regretted it, having broken his vow of giving Esme the silent treatment ever since she began screwing Mogg. Then he regretted regretting it. I don't fucking care, he told himself. Doesn't matter.

  “Spectral? Oh yeah. Duh.” Esme curled one side of her lip in her usual half-assed smile. Which was about all the effort she ever gave. “Makes sense. You so smart, Shay-Shay.”

  Shay pursed his lips, keeping his head turned away.

  Mogg gave a throaty laugh, spiked and sarcastic.

  #

  The feeling of flight was like nothing else. To be honest, it was Shay's favorite thing. It wasn't flight, really. Esme had once called it 'falling with style,' and that was pretty much the scope of it. Shay had liked the sound of that. Falling with style. In fact, he'd embraced the term as his life's mantra.

  Mogg, of course, used the technical jargon: HALO.

  Shay watched Chrysalis fade below from his vantage in the dirigible's open, five-passenger gondola. A maze of smoke stacks burped white steam. He looked out over rusty iron gates and barely-lit cordoned-off ghettos, at the soot-stained Bloc buildings with their tinted glass and begrimed façades aflicker in gaslight. The oppressive dark soon blanketed the city, extinguishing it, and Shay felt a fast disquietude.

  He glanced left where Esme pressed against Mogg in the indirect light of the floor lamps, watched the man pull her close—as close as they could get, with their harnesses on. The airship engine was running high, the air up here cold and thin. Shay closed his eyes and listened to the rapid hiss of the ballonets and the click of the valves as they spat steam.

  “Freezing up here at night,” Esme announced.

  “At night?” Mogg chuckled. “It's always cold outside the city, girl. No furnaces, no steam. Just get your body close to me, baby. I keep you nice and hot.”

  There was a lull, then: “Aren't you cold, Shay-Shay?”

  “Yeah, Channeler. Whyn't you join us? There's enough of the Dog to go around.” Mogg laughed.

  “I'm fine, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mogg said.

  The rest of the way went quiet enough. Shay kept to the edge of the gondola and stayed 'frosty.' He adjusted the clockwork dial on his spec goggles' IR settings and watched for anything, be it some cunning-craft in the frigid skies or weird activity in the blackness below. Occasionally he spotted pinpricks of light on the ground, and he appreciated how high they were; typical drops took them up seven kilometers or more—mostly to avoid concentrated shadow dust clouds and airborne marauders such as shriekers, firedrakes, arcane spies, and the like—and this one was no different, he estimated, though hard to say in the dark.

  Before long the co-pilot announced, “Ternion, we've made target coordinates.”

  “About time,” Mogg said, unpeeling himself from Esme. “Extraction?”

  “We’ll bring her down cab-length at precisely zero seven hundred. One flare for immediate evac.”

  Mogg checked his wristwatch, nodded. “I have zero five two five.”

  Shay checked his own, nodded, and gave it a couple winds.

  “Sound off, Channeler.”

  “Zero five two five,” Shay said low.

  “Do we have a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Then lose the rude ‘tude. Dude.” Mogg pulled down his goggles and crossed to the rear access hatch, a circular metal portal at the back of the gondola. The Extractor grabbed the doorwheel in both hands and twisted it counterclockwise.

  Esme stepped up beside Shay, her leather flight cap already on and buckled, her goggles pulled down over her eyes. “Come on. This was your choice.”

  He looked at her jacket lapel, noticed she still wore the relic she'd taken from him. She collected items to pin to her garb and this one was a weathered, nonsensical button pin he'd found on a previous mission. It had a faded toon of a black kitten poking up from a banana peel and read: ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

  He was tempted to rip it off her. Instead he said, “Maybe so.”

  “Stew all you want, Shay. Just do your fucking job, got it?” Mogg raised the hatch lid. “Now let's do this,” and he dropped through the opening into the black.

  Esme smacked Shay on the shoulder with the back of her hand, adjusted her lenses to red. “Time to fall with style.” She grinned, as if everything was right with the world.

  His mouth went dry. He found it hard to swallow.

  Let's do this.

  Esme hopped into the dark hole and was gone.

  Not fall, he thought. Time to fly.

  #

  As soon as Shay cleared the hatch, his stomach sank, as it always did, with the perception of being weightless. He pitched into a nosedive and the tempest attack of the wind lashed his ears. From the gondola, the world had been mostly dark, but once in the air and away from the lamps of the ship, the night afforded enough illumination to differentiate the horizon and divide earth from sky.

  He adjusted the dial on his spec goggles. The world shifted into an open vista of blues and purples with sporadic contortions of red, and he spotted a rippling orange-red outline about two hundred fifty meters below. Esme. And, to be expected, she pulled first; her freefall suddenly swooped into an almost l
evel bank, scud-surfing in and out of the cumulus shadows.

  Shay searched for Mogg, caught a glimpse about half a klick in the same direction as Esme. He angled his descent toward them and, after a couple hundred meters, pulled the rings on his harness.

  This was his favorite part. Perhaps his only real joy in life. The rig unfolded on his back, appendages unfurled like bat wings, and in a whish of cold air he seized a current, lifted, and flew.

  #

  Shay inhaled the bitter aroma of arcane fallout, that telltale sign they were in ‘the bees’—ops lingo for Blight Zone. No matter how many times he smelled it, the scent surprised him. In Chrysalis, he’d been exposed to the miasma of charcoal and sulfur and tanning reagents, but outside the city the world had become a polluted garden of static particles and bonemeal decay. He’d touched down in a large blue zone but the air was still thick with it. Nearby were the remains of what looked like a large, blasted petroleum tank and massive, distorted trees spread all around. Whatever had happened here, the land had never recovered.

  Shay doffed his harness and dropped it. Despite the work that went into making the things, once they served their purpose they were disposable. That was the way of the technocracy.

  He cast about, saw the warm outlines of his ternion-mates. He headed in their direction, just as they were picking their way toward him.

  The wreckage here was so thick that they had to clear a pathway to one another. Shay found himself feeling anxious every time he grabbed a twisted branch to haul it aside. He trusted in his devices only so far. Although the spec goggles showed nothing but blue, he couldn’t help wonder if the Medusae had adapted, had learned to camouflage their heat. Ternions died by underestimating the hazards of the outside world, and Shay never made that mistake—at least he hoped not.

  He yanked a heavy branch out of the makeshift pathway between himself and Mogg and Esme and tossed it aside. Beneath it was the corroded remains of what looked like a bicycle, accompanied by the skeletal body of what must’ve been its owner, a child not yet grown. They’d seen a thousand such remains. Thousands.

  Mogg and Esme joined him. The Extractor lifted his goggles and checked his forearm. “Damn.”