Neverland's Library: Fantasy Anthology Page 4

  A thorny vine abruptly snaked around Mogg’s throat from behind, knife-like thorns slicing. Dark fluid spilled between the tendrils, and Mogg’s lifeblood pumped out all over Shay. He watched the Extractor’s eyes roll up into his head, then glaze over.

  Mogg’s weight settled heavy over Shay’s legs and hips, and he released the grip of his channeling rod, its coils retracting. He pushed Mogg the Dog’s body aside and it flopped off of him, settling against the wall and atop a coiled mess of petrified stone.

  Shay panicked, crawled to Esme, checked her pulse, felt a heavy loss inside and grief in the pit of his stomach.

  “Did I get him? Shay?”

  He looked up. Tori was sitting atop her own mass of petrification, her leg pinned beneath a stony vine, clutching her chest where Mogg’s quirt was still attached. “He…he called you Shay, right? Are you…?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tori nodded. “Welcome back,” she said, then “You took my mark. That was…all I had left.”

  Shay wasn’t sure if she meant her magic, or if she referred to her last ditch effort to slash Mogg’s throat. He flopped on his rump beside Esme.

  “You planning to kill me?” she asked, her voice soft and girlish and sad.

  He glanced up at his former childhood playmate. He always knew Tori Ewing was a fey little thing. He shook his head. “No.”

  “Then what now? Won’t more come when you…you don’t—”

  He waved her question off, took a breath through his nose, inhaled the shadow dust, scanned the mess around them both. Esme. Mogg. The cunning-man. Shay was sad, too, in a way, but he also felt free for the first time in forever. He was free.

  Shay grunted painfully as he stood up. “Let’s just get you home. Maybe we can figure out a way to get you your mark back.”

  He held out his hand.

  She hesitated, then took it.

  Dead Ox Falls

  Brian Staveley

  AS SOON AS the last of the rice was laid out to dry, the team of river buffalo fed and brushed, and a bowl of hacked-up chicken scraps laid out for the dogs, Chian started walking. It was getting late, but the ruddy, swollen blister of the sun would hang a long time in the summer sky, and with any luck he’d cross the river in Fereng before full dark, hole up somewhere for the night, then reach Dombâng before evening the next day, in time to see the leach burn.

  Sui had tried to convince him not to go.

  “It’s not him, my love,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “The cityfolk have caught a leach, but it doesn’t mean they found the man who killed our son.”

  “Doesn’t mean they didn’t,” Chian snapped, suddenly furious, despite the softness of his wife’s hand cradling his own. “Only way to know is to go there. To see.”

  “They execute leaches in the city practically every year – whenever they catch one – and there’s work to do here. Threshing. Milling. You’ll be gone four days at the height of the summer.”

  “I just have to see,” Chian replied, “to know…”

  He trailed off, memory flooding him, sudden, turgid, and relentless as a mountain stream seething with the summer rains. For the thousandth time, he stared aghast at the scorched stones and shattered timbers at the center of his small village. He walked among the torn, contorted bodies of the dead, dark skin split like old fruit and alive with flies. He searched for his son, for Hien, calling out desperately, trying to pitch his own voice above the grief of all the others raking through the wreckage, above the piercing calls of the dark birds circling overhead. For the thousandth time, he failed.

  “If it’s the leach who destroyed the village,” he told his wife, taking her hands, “I can ask him about Hien.”

  “And if it is not? If it’s just some other benighted soul?”

  “Benighted soul?” he snapped. “They are perversions of nature, abominations. Their powers twist them…”

  Gently but firmly, Sui pulled herself free, then raised her hands in surrender. “And if it is some other leach?” she asked wearily.

  Chian let out a long, ragged breath. “Then at least I will see one of the bastards fed to the flames.”

  #

  It had been obvious at a glance that the man was a foreigner. His skin was paler than winter onion, paler than Chian had ever seen, and his irises, blue as a damp summer sky, looked washed out, insubstantial. Blue and red ink snaked around his muscled arms in great loops and whorls, and he wore bright silver hoops in both ears. By Chian’s guess, he was a sailor off one of the huge ships anchored in Dombâng, but what he was doing here, way up in the hills two days’ walk from the city, was anyone’s guess. He had stepped into Wayin’s with a slender walking staff in his hand, but, instead of relinquishing it inside the door, he kept it propped against the long wooden bar, reaching out to touch it every so often.

  The stranger had been plenty polite. He’d asked for a pot of tea and a leg of chicken. Then, when he’d finished those, a bottle of Wayin’s whisky. He’d drunk a quarter of the bottle himself, but sloshed the rest of it around readily enough, filling and refilling the glasses of the dozen folks who were seated at the tables around him, coaxing men who needed to be working their terraces early the next morning to stay for one more round, just one more round.

  If he’d been liberal with his liquor, he proved less so with his story. By the time Chian wound his way up the hill late that night, stars shivering above him, he knew only that the stranger hailed from some remote city to the north, that he was making his way inland to check on a large parcel of land for his employer, and that he seemed to have a comfortable amount of coin tucked away in that purse of his. Not a bad fellow, Chian remembered thinking, but a strange one.

  An hour later the screaming started; screaming, then fire. Chian seized his knives and raced drunkenly down the rutted lane, but it was finished by the time he arrived. The northerner had vanished, half the village was destroyed, and people lay dead in the street. No one had seen it all. Almost everyone had seen too much – terrifying, unnatural flashes of light, stones ripped from their settings as though by an invisible hand, flame bursting from nowhere, raging in huge columns even when there was nothing left to burn.

  Three of the bodies were easy enough to find: they’d been…smashed, over and over again, as though by some massive hammer, the bones broken in dozens of places, bloody white shards stabbing through the shredded wreckage of skin. Chian had seen plenty of dead people over the years, had buried his own father after the sickness carved him out from the inside, had helped to wash and bury corpses bloated with the beetle pox or the awful horror of the shaking fits. He wasn’t squeamish about death, but this…the scale of the violence, the savagery of it, twisted something inside of him and kept twisting until he vomited, gagging on the stench, the sick taste in the back of his throat.

  And still, the three dead in the village square weren’t the worst of it. It took the people two days to find the other bodies, both of which had tumbled into the narrow river that ran through the town and washed far downstream. By the time the corpses were carried back to the village for scrubbing and burial, fish and eels and been at their eyes. The flesh was slack, waterlogged, bloated by the sullen glare of the sun. Chian wept with relief when he realized that Hien’s body was not among them. Only weeks later did he begin to realize what a fool he’d been.

  For all the horror of the recovered bodies, there was a cold comfort in having found them, having washed and anointed the broken skin with milk and flowers, having sung over them the soft, three-voiced hymns of farewell as they were laid into the earth. Of Hien’s bones, however, there was no sign. For his broken flesh, no song.

  Chian spent months scouring the hills and ravines, walking downriver as far as the gorge, hunting through thickets and brambles with his hounds, stupidly calling out his son’s name, as though the boy’s corpse might hear him and respond. The body was out there somewhere, Chian was certain of it, and yet, day after day, night after night, he failed to find it. In
the end, Sui persuaded him to stop. The farm needed tending, and his other children, two girls and a young boy, only five, needed their father.

  One night he gathered the family together, built a fire out on the pig run between the terraces, and burned Hien’s few possessions.

  “Ananshael has him,” he told his youngest children. “Let us all pray that the Lord of the Grave will be gentle with his soul.”

  More gentle than I was, he amended silently, closing his eyes, remembering all the times he’d barked at his son, the times he’d hit him. It was no worse than the discipline Chian’s own father had doled out, all just part of teaching a boy to become a man…He turned away from the flames, eyes burning, unable to look any longer.

  #

  Dombâng was every bit as noisy and filthy as Chian remembered – narrow streets between teetering teak houses reeking of smoke, shit, and fish-oil, buildings so tightly packed and so tall the air refused to move, people shoving past one another without a word or a smile, without even a nod. It took him half the morning just to find the plaza where the prisoners slated for execution were kept in a long row of steel cages, exposed to the indifference of the elements and the bile of their fellow citizens.

  As he pushed forward, Chian realized that he’d clenched his hands into fists, that he was shouldering his way through the crowd more forcefully than he’d intended. He was a head shorter than most of the people surrounding him, but a lifetime hauling water and mending fences, splitting wood and working his terraces, had knit a strength into his wiry limbs that wasn’t evident at first glance. With an effort he relaxed his hands, slowed his pace, channeling all his terrible energy into a single repeated prayer, a prayer offered up to no god in particular, and all of them at once: Let it be the pale leach. Let it be him. Let it be him.

  All at once, he found himself abruptly free, standing alone in the wide space between the press of people and the cages of the condemned. Scores of the city’s residents were staring at the leach, shouting taunts and curses, but they were doing it from a distance, wary that the prisoner, even bound, even with his hideous powers drowned in drug, might somehow lash out at them. Chian, sensing the collective wariness, pulled up short. He felt suddenly alone and exposed on the empty sweep of flagstone, and stepped back into the fringe of the mob, welcoming, for the first time since arriving in the city, the jostling of other people, as though the flesh of so many strangers were a shield that would hide him, protect him while he looked at the man who had murdered his son.

  Only, the figure huddled behind the bars was not the sky-eyed stranger he remembered. He was smaller, dark-haired and dark-skinned, like Chian himself. A Channarian, then, he realized grimly. The whole thing had been easier when he believed the leach to be an utter stranger, someone with foreign coin in his purse and the shape of strange words on his tongue.

  When the leach raised his head, Chian’s heart turned to cold lead inside his chest. Ten paces distant, wrists bound behind his back, eyes dull with pain and drug, skin torn in dozens of places from the small stones and bits of broken crockery that children hurled between the bars, sat Hien, the son whose passing he had mourned almost a year ago, whose things he had burned on a cool, clear autumn night when the stars burned as brightly as the sparks from the fire.

  #

  By midnight, the press in the square was gone. Knots of drunken sailors wove across the flagstones, heading from one tavern to the next while a few sloe-eyed whores loitered in the shadows, alternately cajoling and cursing the young men. The guards kept their vigil at either end of the long line of cages, but they didn’t look particularly alert. After all, the prisoners were caged and shackled hand and foot. The leach might have had them on edge, but Chian had watched as three men dressed in dark robes arrived near dusk to hold his son, force back his head and open his mouth. As Hien thrashed, the tallest of the three poured some sort of liquid down his throat. Chian knew the stories. Properly drugged, the leach was no more dangerous than any of the other caged men.

  He waited a long time to approach, fearing, at first, that the guards would intervene. He need not have worried. The whole point of displaying the condemned for a full week before execution was to expose them to the mockery, ridicule, and abuse of Dombâng’s citizenry. In addition to the children hurling rocks, Chian had watched grown women lobbing dead rats into the cages, drunkards urinating through the bars, and a priest of Orella, who attempted to catechize the prisoners for the better part of an hour. The only time the guards intervened was when people tried to actually reach into the cages. It wouldn’t be hard to talk to his son, but hour after hour Chian stood motionless, his chest empty and hollow, soundless as a drum from which the hide had been torn away.

  As the stars ground through their relentless circuit, however, he realized that every hour he waited was an hour closer to morning, an hour closer to Hien’s execution, and finally, legs trembling, he made his way to the cage. The guards glanced lazily in his direction, and, anticipating the scrutiny, he hurled a few shards of stone through the gate, watched them rain harmlessly onto the floor, and then cursed loudly and drunkenly, a vicious screed about abomination and justice, the sort of thing he’d heard scores of times already. When the guards looked away, he let his voice falter, then fail.

  Hien looked older than he remembered. He was a man grown now, and the filling out of his shoulders, the dark stubble marking his cheeks was the least of it. There was a new hardness in those dark eyes, a set to the jaw that made his son’s most stubborn rebellions back at their farm look like childhood tantrums. Twin scars ran down the side of his face, as though some person or animal had tried to flay off his skin, and the fingers of his left hand were twisted as though they’d been broken, then set poorly.

  “Father,” he said quietly, his words heavy, slick with the drugs.

  For all that Chian had rehearsed what he would say in the long hours leading to darkness, he could only shake his head. He felt the tears hot in his eyes, but made no effort to wipe them away.

  “What…” he began, then trailed off, his voice a jagged bone caught in his throat.

  Hien opened his mouth to respond, but for a long time he, too, said nothing. Then, finally, he shook himself. “They got me,” he said. “It had to happen.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Chian groaned. “I thought the leach killed you.”

  “I’ll be dead soon enough,” Hien replied. “It took them a few months, but they know their business with leaches here.” He chuckled, a dry, dead sound. “You were right, father. I never should have come to the city.”

  A prisoner in the next cage stirred, cursed at them for talking, then lapsed into a quiet, helpless weeping, his body curled into a tight ball. Hien’s eyes were glazed, but he kept them fixed on his father.

  “I used to think I had answers,” the youth went on. “I used to think you were a fool. A bastard who beat his son because he hated himself.” He shook his head wearily. “As if I knew the first thing, back then, about self-hatred.”

  “What happened?” Chian asked finally. “That night?”

  A dark horror passed across Hien’s gaze. “I made a terrible, terrible mistake.”

  Memories of the fire-gutted homes, of the smashed corpses, raked across Chian’s mind.

  “I just wanted his money,” Hien said. “The stranger. I saw him in Wayin’s, knew he had coin, and thought it was the answer. An answer, at least. I didn’t know what I was back then, what I would become, but I had a feeling, some horrible hunch, I guess. I just knew that I needed to get out, to go somewhere bigger, somewhere no one knew me, to leave. Then along comes this stranger, a man I don’t know, that I don’t have any reason to like or care about. He’s got no history and a heavy purse. Seemed like an answered prayer.

  “I never intended to hurt him. Not bad, anyway. Thought I’d get the jump on him just outside Wayin’s, take his coin, then run.” A hoarse, desperate sound escaped Hien’s lips, half-laugh, half-sob. “He was even tougher than
he looked, that pale bastard. I managed to knock away his stick, but he had two knives in his coat. Almost killed me with them.”

  He fell silent, staring into the dark. Chian watched the fear and confusion of the small boy he had known move beneath the rough planes of the man’s face.

  “That’s when it happened,” Hien continued finally.

  “It?”

  “My first delving,” his son replied, shaking his head. “In the all the stories, the leaches control this vast, awful power, but it’s not like that at all. At least at first, the power controls you. I was terrified, fighting for my life, and it just…happened. I tore the man apart, burned him to ash on the spot – his flesh, his bones, ash – all without even meaning it.” He took a long, shuddering breath, then fell silent.

  “And the others?” Chian asked finally, his voice weak and wavering as the light of the torches flickering on the perimeter of the plaza. “Our friends? Our neighbors? Why did you kill them?”

  “I don’t know,” Hien said, defeated. “At the time, I didn’t even know what I was doing. It was like being drunk and insane all at the same time. I think maybe they found me, saw what I did, realized what I was…I’m not sure. All I remember is terror, and pain, and power.” He raised his eyes to his father, lip trembling before he forced out the question: “Who…”

  Chian shook his head. “Never mind, son.”

  “Who?”

  The farmer met the steel in his son’s voice with his own.

  “They’re dead, Hien. Saying the names won’t bring them back.”

  A shout from the end of the line of cages yanked his head around. One of the guards.

  “You! Rice picker!”

  Chian pointed a hesitant finger at his own chest.

  “Yes, you. Stay clear of the bars. You want to piss on him or throw rocks, fine, but keep clear of the cage. That one may be chained up, but he’s sick and he’s dangerous.”

  Disgust roiled beneath the guard’s words, and Chian swallowed, then took a step back.