IGMS Issue 27 Read online

  Keyes pulled a knife from his belt and advanced on him, a sneer contorting his face. Ethan stood his ground, drawing his own blade. He didn't move as well as he had in his youth -- the plantation surgeons had seen to that. But against a man as big and clumsy as the barman, he was more than quick enough.

  Keyes slashed at him. Ethan jumped back out of reach, the shining steel flashing past harmlessly.

  Della, the younger of the serving girls, appeared in the kitchen doorway and seeing the two of them facing each other in the middle of the tavern, knives drawn, let out a small cry. Ethan's eyes flicked in her direction.

  "Go back in the kitchen!" he said.

  Sensing an opening, Keyes lunged at him again, thrusting his blade straight at Ethan's chest. Ethan shifted his weight, eluding the attack, and drove the heel of his left hand up into the barman's nose. He heard cartilage snap, felt blood splatter on his arm, neck, and face.

  Keyes staggered back. Ethan closed the distance between them with a single stride and hammered a fist into the man's side. The barman gasped. Ethan hit him a second time, and Keyes collapsed to the floor. Standing over him, Ethan drew back his foot to kick the man.

  "Ethan, don't!" Della cried out.

  She looked terrified, her eyes wide, her cheeks pale.

  He pivoted and when he did kick out it was only to knock the knife from Keyes's hand. The blade skittered across the tavern floor.

  "If you ever come near me again, you'll get worse," Ethan said, glaring down at the barman, breathing hard. "And if you or Hawker or his men ever touch Henry Dall again, or take so much as a scrap of wood from his shop, I'll kill you. Do you understand?"

  Keyes had his eyes closed and was panting as well, but he nodded once.

  "You also might want to get rid of that wine downstairs. The customs boys don't look kindly on fat barmen who traffic in goods from enemies of the Crown. And I'll be sending them to your door straight away."

  He packed up Henry's tools, then ducked into the alcove where he slept to retrieve his meager belongings: a change of clothes, a spare blade, a coat, and a thin bundle of letters he had received from his sister since his arrival in Boston. By the time he crossed back through the great room, Keyes was sitting up. Blood still flowed freely from his nose down over his lips and chin, and he glowered at Ethan as if girding himself for another fight.

  "By the way, I quit," Ethan said, walking past him with barely a glance. "In case that wasn't clear."

  "Don' ever show yar face in here again!"

  Ethan laughed. "I don't think there's any danger of that." Turning to the serving girl, he said, "Take care of yourself, Della. Say goodbye to Simon and Sarah for me."

  She nodded

  Ethan laughed once more, pulled the door open, and stepped out into the street.

  When Ethan entered the cooperage again, Henry was straightening up his workbench, humming to himself.

  He turned at the sound of the door opening and then gaped as Ethan opened the sack and began to remove the recovered tools one by one.

  "How did you find them?"

  "They were at the Silver Key, in the cellar. I'm sorry, Henry. If I had known that Keyes was storing the goods Hawker stole, I would have stopped working for him long ago."

  "And if you'd done that, I wouldn't have my toolth back." Henry grinned, exposing the gap in his teeth.

  Ethan smiled in turn. "True."

  "It gueth I owe you fifteen shillingth."

  "Maybe."

  Henry frowned. "That was what we agreed, right?"

  "Yes," Ethan said. "But there are other things to consider. Thanks to you, I have a new profession: Ethan Kaille, Thieftaker. But I no longer have a place to live and couldn't help noticing that there's a spare room over your shop, and another one out back."

  "The one out back is mine," Henry said. "The one upstairs . . ." He shrugged, gave a toothless smile. "I could rent it to you."

  "How many weeks would ten of those shillings buy me?"

  The cooper shrugged again. "A lot. Three months, I would think."

  "You should know that I was a convict. Almost fifteen years ago I took part in a mutiny aboard a privateering ship. If you don't want a man like me living over your shop, I'll understand. No hard feelings."

  "You gonna steal from me?" the cooper asked.

  "No."

  "You gonna come down here in the middle of the night and cut my throat?"

  Ethan smiled, shook his head. "No."

  "You gonna pay rent and get my tools back when Hawker steals them again?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you're welcome here."

  Ethan put out his hand, and Henry gripped it. "Thank you," Ethan said.

  "I think I still owe you five shillings."

  "You can pay me later." Ethan put down his small bundle of belongings. "Can I leave these things here for a while?"

  "Of course," Henry said. "Where are you going?"

  "I don't know. I'm just going to walk."

  "All right. I'll see you later, then."

  Ethan nodded and stepped back out into Cooper's Alley. He inhaled deeply, taking in the familiar smells of the city: fish and saltwater, hay and horse manure, smoke and hewn wood. His forearm still throbbed from the spells he had cast, but he didn't mind. There was something familiar about that as well. He looked in both directions, and then struck out southward, toward Fort Hill.

  It felt odd to do nothing but walk. And yet Ethan remembered this feeling, too, from before the cane fields and the Ruby Blade. From when he last had been free.

  Our Vast and Inevitable Death

  by S. Boyd Taylor

  Artwork by Dean Spencer

  * * *

  On the tenth day of the battle, in the before-dawn lull, I see our leader, Warlord Grig, walking the pickets alone, staring at the distant campfires of our enemies the way I have stared at them myself. Not with fear, not with desperation, but with a hard and empty soul. There are only two thousand of us here, wedged between the everwhite slopes of the Varrashan and the perfect cone of the Krazelshan. But out there, down in the pass and out on the plain, the camp fires stretch unto the horizon and past, so far that I cannot tell them from the stars.

  I am nobody, a peasant from a village. Son of a pig farmer. But I hesitate only a moment before going to my Warlord and placing my fist on my heart.

  He nods to me, and I relax as he looks out again at the campfires -- at our vast and inevitable death -- and says, "My arm is tired, Pikeman Hellar."

  "Sir?" I am surprised he knows my name. I have only talked to him a few times, as few as any other pikeman or halberdier may have. Passing greetings, small opportune conversations. He must know all of our names.

  He says: "My arm is tired. My shoulder, my elbow, my hand. I have cut down eight-hundred and twenty-six Boskee. I can barely move my fingers even to scratch a flea, they are locked in the shape of a pommel. You were a farmer -- pigs, wasn't it? -- no stranger to hard work. What would you suggest I do tomorrow?"

  "Use your left arm. Sir."

  He smiles at that, and looks away from Death's dark eye and into mine. "We won't get out of this alive, you know."

  "I know."

  We all know. Maybe we didn't on the march out here, but we know now. The best we can do is slow down the Boskee advance. Let the other legions get in place, let Castle Maur prepare. Though how they can prepare for this, I'm not sure. There must be more Boskee fighting men than all the people in the homelands.

  I feel a movement in my gut. I have to say something into this silence, into this void opening around us to suck our spirits in. "Our deaths don't matter, sir. In the city of Wujia in Shaou, they killed most every man and boy child. A man who escaped wandered through our village and told us the blood was as high as your waist in the central square. Heads were piled into pyramids taller than the watch tower. And the women . . . What they did . . . Those demons."

  "We will not stop them."

  "I know that, sir. But we have to try
."

  "Three more days. If we can hold them three more days."

  "We will."

  He nods at me and I place my fist over my heart.

  It will be tomorrow that I see him die, pierced through by so many arrows that I cannot see the shape of the man at the core. It will be tomorrow that the Boskee break us and chase us like the tide unto the gray gravestone walls of Castle Maur that cannot hold, cannot possibly last. It will be less than a year before the Boskee burn every Maurn they can find alive, overturn and shatter the towering stone bodies of our Gods, and hang chandeliers made from the femurs and skulls of babies from the roofs of our temples so they can listen to the tiny, perfect sound as the wind passes through.

  But for now, we are inspired. We both look out at the countless twinkling campfires and silently promise to kill two-hundred Boskee today. No, two thousand.

  We each remember where we came from -- I from a small mudhole, he from a great palace -- and think of our fathers and brothers and mothers and sisters, and we mumble prayers under our breath to call down the might of our soon-to-be-fallen Gods so our loved ones will not be killed, will not be captured. And while we pray, we beg not a single favor for our own lives.

  "There," Warlord Grig says. "Those torches. They are marshalling."

  "I am ready," I say. And I believe that I am, but I am not. I cannot be. I think this is just a war, just swords and steel and horses. I do not realize that my entire people, my entire culture and language can be erased from history. I do not yet know that Gods can die.

  "Pikeman Hellar, have the herald sound formations."

  The Salt Man

  by Melissa Mead

  Artwork by Anna Repp

  * * *

  When a widow weeps, the Salt Man comes to her.

  When the surgeon's knife has bitten deep, the Salt Man is waiting.

  He takes the tears of grief and agony and despair, and of joy so sharp and fleeting it feels like pain. The salt drops, from prisoner and penitent alike, collect on his thin, pale palm and nourish him. Only the first tears of a newborn are forbidden to him, for it is said that one taste of them will unmake him.

  His cadaverous face and long black coat, half-glimpsed in moments of despair, haunted the people of Volkburg. Mourners saw, briefly, bottomless dark eyes looking into theirs from a salt-white face, and felt a cold hand touch their cheek. Then the Salt Man vanished, to become part of the shadows and frost until human pain called him forth again. Those he'd touched gasped, felt their hearts resume beating, and life went on.

  Gisela felt him stalking her even before her husband died. She wouldn't cry in front of Hartwin, who'd given her a white-faced smile after the surgeon left and assured her in a whisper that he still had another perfectly good leg. She only allowed herself to cry in the other room of their little cottage. That was when she first sensed the cold presence in the room with her. A dark shadow, half-glimpsed. A scent of stone and sea. She dried her tears before they could fall and hurried back to Hartwin's side.

  She held back her tears while Hartwin thrashed and moaned, while she sponged fever-sweat from his forehead, while his loving eyes stared through her as though she were a stranger. But when those eyes lost all expression and his damp, hot hand turned as cold as clay, she knelt by the bed and sobbed. When something colder still than Hartwin's clay hands touched her face, she screamed, and the touch withdrew.

  From that point until the funeral, Gisela kept silent and dry-eyed, working until last light on what visitors assumed was a piece of delicate crocheting. The ignored visitors shook their heads, murmuring sympathetically about Gisela's youth, the cruel brevity of her marriage, and the fragile state of her nerves. Gisela pressed her lips tight and kept working.

  Snow lingered farther up the mountain on the day of Hartwin's funeral. The chilled mourners didn't stay long at the graveside. Soon only Gisela remained, fingering her delicate crochet-like work with one hand while she steeled her courage.

  "Hartwin, mein Geliebter," she said, and let her tears fall.

  She felt the icy touch on her cheek at once, the haunting presence made briefly solid, and turned to confront her stalker. Her hand clamped onto a bony wrist. Untaken tears slid down her cheeks as she glared into bottomless black eyes. "Give him back."

  The Salt Man tried to pull away, but Gisela held him fast.

  "Release me," he said in a voice that rasped like the hinge of a long-unopened door.

  "Give me back Hartwin."

  "I have not that power. I am not Death."

  "Oh no? You stand by deathbeds and open graves, shrouded in black. I've seen you. I've seen people cross the road to avoid you, even though they say they don't know why they do it. What can you be but Death by another name?"

  "I do not take lives. Only tears. I do what I must to live."

  "You live on other people's pain. If you're not Death, you're his dog." Her lips curved in a bitter, heartbroken expression that wasn't really a smile. "And a dog that preys on people needs to be chained."

  Now she removed her hand from his, revealing a mesh of silver, gold, and white now embedded in his wrist. The work of her long nights with the crochet hooks.

  "Made of silver wire, my hair, and a thread from Hartwin's shroud. The book says it will vanish once you give me what I wish." She took a deep breath. "Take time from my life to bring Hartwin back. Years, if you need to. Just leave us a few together, please."

  "I cannot."

  "Please. Just a few weeks. A few days."

  "I have not that power."

  Gisela's heart sank. She'd been prepared for rage. Inhuman fury. Treachery. Anything but this impassive refusal.

  "If you won't let him go, I won't let you go either."

  The Salt Man simply watched Gisela's untaken tears dry on her cheeks. When she walked away, he followed.

  People turned as they passed, whispering behind their hands. The young goatherd who took Hartwin's flock to and from the upper pasture stared outright.

  "Frau Solberg, your shadow is wrong," said the boy in a worried voice.

  Gisela kept walking, ramrod straight, determined not to show fear or despair to the creature behind her. When they reached the cottage, she turned to find the Salt Man paused on the threshold.

  "I must not wear flesh for long," he said.

  Gisela remembered Hartwin's body lying cold and empty on their bed. "Some of us have no choice about how long we 'wear flesh.' Get inside."

  He strode past her into the main room. In the little house, he loomed larger. Gisela braced herself, remembering stories of his bone-chilling touch, his merciless gaze. But the Salt Man just stood on the rag rug before the hearth, shifting from foot to foot as though his soles were tender as an infant's.

  "I feel pain," he said.

  He sounded more like a child with a bellyache than a creature of nightmares.

  "Sit down, then," she said, taken aback.

  He sat, clumsily, as though he'd never tried to sit before. He sat on the rug, although there was a chair just steps away.

  Gisela stirred up the fire. In its familiar light, she studied her prisoner's inhumanly white face without flinching. "The stories say you drink tears."

  "Yes."

  "The stories also say you bring sickness and suffering to cause more pain."

  "I do not. I cannot. The Law forbids it."

  "Will you bring back Hartwin?"

  "I cannot. I have no power over death."

  "I don't believe you. I still think you are Death. No matter what you call yourself, that chain will hold you. I won't let you stalk anyone else."

  The Salt Man fingered the mesh that bound him. It had sunk within the skin. He pulled on the skin as though it were clothing that he could remove, and when that did no good, he turned and thrust his arm into the fire.

  Gisela screamed. The Salt Man howled in astonished pain. Gisela knocked him to the ground and threw a blanket over his smoldering arm. When she took the blanket away his charred coat-sleeve
fell to ash. The skin beneath it was red and blistered, but the mesh shone undamaged.

  The Salt Man stared at his burned arm with a look of disbelief. He held it to his chest, rocking and moaning, but dry-eyed.

  Gisela rushed outside and returned with a pan of cold water.

  "Sit in the chair. Give me your arm."

  To her astonishment, he obeyed. She soaked clean rags in the water and wrapped cool bandages around the burn. Relief flooded the Salt Man's face.

  "Kindness for kindness is the first Law. I will repay this kindness, Gisela."

  She couldn't meet his eyes. "Don't call me that. Ever. And I'd have done the same for a dog."

  "Is that not your name?"

  "My name that friends use. If you must call me something, call me Frau Solberg."

  Someone knocked on the door. A gentle voice called, "Gisela? Are you there, dear?"

  She ran to open the door. "Oma Solberg!"

  Hartwin's grandmother hobbled into the room and set a stoneware bowl on the table. "I brought you some einbrennsuppe."

  "How can you both be Frau Solberg?" said the Salt Man.

  Hartwin's grandmother froze, the fragrant steam from the soup swirling about her, and stared at the chair where the Salt Man sat. Her vision seemed to change focus. "Der Salzmann? Oh dear."

  "You can see him, Oma? Really see him, not just a shadow?"

  She nodded. "Gisela, child, what is he doing here?"

  Tears stung Gisela's eyes. The Salt Man leaned forward in trembling anticipation. Oma Solberg frowned, and he leaned back.

  "I want him to give back Hartwin."

  Oma Solberg dropped into a chair. "Oh, child, don't you think I'd have asked for my Heinrich back, if such things could be done? I loved my grandson, but this . . . No. This poor creature can't help you."

  The Salt Man's indignant look at being called a "poor creature" would have made Gisela laugh, if she weren't so near tears.