Arcane II Read online

  ARCANE II

  Edited by Nathan Shumate

  Arcane II

  copyright © 2013 Nathan Shumate

  Smashwords edition

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover illustration by Nihil

  www.nihil.fr

  Cover design by Nathan Shumate

  Cold Fusion Media Empire

  www.coldfusionmedia.us

  All contents are copyright ©2013 their respective authors.

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION: ENVY AND PRIDE Nathan Shumate

  FIRE AND FLESH Michael Fletcher

  WITH YOU Ian Welke

  TREE HUGGER Gef Fox

  CONVENTION OF EKPHRASIS Libby Cudmore and Matthew Quinn Martin

  90-DAY LIMIT Philip M. Roberts

  HURRICANE DRUNK Harry Markov

  LAKESHORE DRIVE Joanna Parypinski

  ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE Miranda Ciccone

  FATE’S MASK Steve Toase

  PALACE OF RATS Anna Sykora

  THE PIANIST’S WIFE Nicole M. Taylor

  NIGHTCRAWLERS Jean Graham

  IN THE PAINT Michael Haynes

  BENEATH THE SURFACE Milo James Fowler

  THE BEATIFICATION OF THOMAS SMALL, OR HOW TO MAKE A SAINT Priya Sharma

  WHAT IT MEANS TO LOVE Andrew Bourelle

  HIS CITY Craig Pay

  THE DUBIOUS APOTHEOSIS OF BASKIN GOUGH Patrick S. McGinnity

  TRIPTYCH Adele Gardner

  THE HOUSE THAT WEPT PUDDIN’ Eric Dimbleby

  THE LAST LAUGH Brooke Miller

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Introduction: Envy and Pride

  Nathan Shumate

  Damn. I look over the table of contents for this edition of the Arcane anthology series, and that’s the only word that keeps coming to mind. Damn. I don’t know how so many terrific stories made it past the cluttered slushpiles of the top-paying markets in the field to arrive at my virtual door, but I’m glad that those editors and first readers were perhaps asleep at the wheel on the day that these stories passed unnoticed under their glazed eyes and were left for my enjoyment—and now, yours.

  If you read the first Arcane anthology, you might remember that much of my introduction dwelt, perhaps a little too energetically, on the weaknesses to be found in too many of the themed anthologies on the market, especially those which focus tightly on a sub-sub-subgenre. I bragged at the time that the only common element in the stories presented there was that they were all terrific, but several reviewers did note that the selections in the first Arcane presented... not a sameness, but a complementary nature, and underlying current that all were unable to put their finger on, and few tried.

  Looking at the twenty-one stories waiting for you in this volume, I can discover at least a rough label for the commonality between them: every one is something that I wish I had written. And if the only way that I can publish them under my own name is to assemble them into an anthology that I’ve edited, so be it. The next best thing to having written them is having discovered them and presented them to you, feeling like an uncle who can take no credit for his siblings’ children but is proud of them nonetheless.

  Fire and Flesh

  Michael R. Fletcher

  Three months into the voyage the winds died. The sheets hung slack, dejected and flat like the eyes of the crew. The ship had been calmed for a week and tempers were beginning to fray. Captain Pizarr, who had begun showing Cotardist tendencies two weeks out of port, was more literally fraying. At first his fingers had blackened and begun to smell. Now his entire left arm was tattered flesh that showed yellow bone where skin had dried and parted. That the good Captain had taken to picking at the arm and flinging strips of his own rotting flesh overboard did little for the crew’s morale. That he stood calm and poised at the railing with a tight and knowing smile while watching the gathered fish feed on that discarded meat did even less.

  We had first met in the service of King Furimmer and later, over the long years, become fast friends. Together we stood at the Battle of Sinnlos as the Seiger Clan’s Delusionist cracked and lost control of her inner demons. Captain Pizarr had been a handsome lieutenant and I, Gehirn Schlechtes, a promising young member of King Furimmer’s cadre of Pyrocasts. Somewhat unstable perhaps, but all the more valued for it.

  Those days are ten years dead and gone. The Captain has changed. I have changed. Many nights I have stood hidden in the shadow of the fo’c’sle, fat and balding, watching my only friend feed the fish.

  At night, when the crew thought the Captain asleep, I would listen to them speculate as to the condition of the Captain’s body. His uniform, a sun-faded blue bedecked with medals and honours, was stained in dark patches from something leaking within. Had the rot reached his torso? If not yet, what would happen when it did?

  Times and people change and I had degenerated from lonely and depressed to unstable and useful, and found employment as King Furimmer’s Executioner. I used my growing power in his service and when I became truly dangerous he cast me aside. But not before demanding one last foul act from me. I was to spy on my only friend and, should he stray from Furimmer’s plans, carry out the King’s Justice. Furimmer asked this of me and there was no room for refusal. I suppose hoping for loyalty from a Sociocast had been foolish. I told Pizarr nothing of this and sour betrayal ate at my guts.

  When Captain Pizarr had Reizung, the Ship’s Counsellor, thrown overboard, the crew had nearly mutinied. Seasoned sailors knew the danger of unwatched and unrestrained Maniacasts. A ship was too small and confined for those not in firm control of their reason. But that had been early in the voyage. Captain Pizarr had been dashing and persuasive and the Counsellor had been a prick. A good Ship’s Counsellor works alongside the crew and doesn’t rub in the fact that his only real task is preserving their sanity and keeping the Maniacasts in check. Reizung had wandered the deck, pompous and immaculate, complaining of boredom while the crew toiled at their tasks. No one had missed him. Until Captain Pizarr started to rot.

  Instability, doubt, depression and fear. Such thoughts breed insanity. As the crew grew to fear both Pizarr and myself, they themselves began displaying Delusionist tendencies. Unschuldig of the Crow’s Watch Crew had always had a affinity for snakes, but when ill-tempered vipers appeared where there had been none Pizarr had ordered the young man drowned in a bucket. When things started to go missing the crew knew there was a budding Kleptocast on-board. If they couldn’t figure out who it was before he grew in strength, there’d be no stopping him.

  ***

  Stoßinder Rückseite, the First Mate, approached me one evening. With his head bowed, he dared only quick glances at my face to gauge my reaction.

  “The Captain is...” His gaze darted to meet mine and skittered away. “The crew fears he may die. They fear he may already be...” He stared at the stained deck and I watched him steel his nerve. “Dead.”

  I waited until he looked up and showed him my over-large canines in a leer. I did not have to pretend to be dangerous and deranged. I was. As a cadre Pyrocast and King Furimmer’s Executioner I had earned a reputation. There wasn’t a man aboard, my only friend the Captain included, who wasn’t terrified of what I was capable of.

  “If any man raises a hand against Captain Pizarr or disobeys a single order... I’ll reduce the entire ship to a sludge of floating ash.”

  Rückseite deflated like sails in a flagging wind. He looked to be on the verge of tears and I wanted to comfort him. There was nothing within me that knew how. Where would I have learned such behaviour?

  “Ash,” I whispered again and shivered. It had been too long and a ship was no place for a true conflagration. I remembered watching Ausf
al burn at the Battle of Sinnlos. Rückseite fled the deck. I may have been grinning at the fond memory.

  ***

  Pizarr’s self-hatred gnawed at his psyche, and though I could both understand and relate to his plight, I could not forgive. He had killed the Counsellor, the one man who could have saved us both.

  The day we set sail from Grauchloss Harbour the Captain had joined me on the deck as I oversaw the final loading of the ship.

  “Gehirn, my old friend,” he said, thumping me on the back, “death will be an escape from a lifetime of defeat.”

  I was never sure if he meant this to be reassuring.

  We had talked at great length many times over the years. Pizarr’s childhood had been a disappointment to his mother and his adulthood had been a disappointment to his father. Success was the last thing he wanted.

  One morning over breakfast—a tasteless sludge of boiled meat and grey vegetable matter—Captain Pizarr joked that he had been secretly hoping the crew would dump him overboard in mutiny. Their cowardice and acceptance of his increasingly insane and dangerous behaviour only fed his depression.

  “Men,” said Captain Pizarr, “are maggots. The wretched rot of the world.”

  I watched as he pushed the food around on his plate and ate none of it. When had he stopped eating? After he left I devoured his breakfast as well as my own so that the cook would report to the men that the Captain was still eating. Afterward I patted the roundness of my sated belly and hated myself. My mother would never allow me to leave the table with food still on my plate, and I still can’t.

  Can I blame her for what I have become?

  When do you take responsibility for who you are?

  ***

  Days slid past like the neverending morass of seaweed. I watched the good Captain feed the fish and the men watched me, wondering if they dared mutiny.

  On the twentieth calmed day the ship drifted into a damp fog bank that smelled of mud and rotting fish. I could see neither the man in the crow’s nest nor, when I looked over the railing, the sea. A heavy miasma ate every sound, sucking each noise hungrily and swallowing it into murky bowels. Men had to scream themselves hoarse just to be heard on the far side of the deck. The superstitious claimed this was the work of an unhinged Delusionist hidden somewhere aboard. Older sailors bragged about how they’d seen worse.

  Fearing that he might take this opportunity to feed the fish one final course, I went looking for the Captain. I found him standing at the bow coughing up rot-stained chunks flecked with dried blood and spitting them into the sea. He was first to hear the breaking surf and ran screaming orders to drop anchor and heave hard about. These sudden signs of life from our Captain gave the crew some brief hope. No one knew if the ravages of a Cotardist’s delusions could be reversed by something as simple as excitement, but anything was better than watching him pick himself apart.

  ***

  Pizarr later admitted to me that he didn’t know why he’d alerted the crew. Perhaps his survival instinct had enjoyed one last hurrah before surrendering to the inevitable decay that devoured all desires except that for an end. The other possibility, which I suggested and he liked far less, was that King Furimmer, a powerful Sociocast and master manipulator of people, had imbued Pizarr’s Charter with some manner of coercion. Though Pizarr would be governor of any new lands discovered, ruling as representative of the King, that King was not to be disobeyed.

  That night as the crew slept, restless with dreams of women and land, I spied on Pizarr as he stood alone in his cramped quarters. I watched as he undressed, guessing what he’d find but still dreading the reality. He moved carefully as if to avoid causing his rotting body further harm. How did he not lose his nerve for this piecemeal death?

  Pizarr removed the stained silk shirt and exposed his torso. Ribs showed through flesh and in places I could see through to his inert organs. His lungs hung like mouldering cheese-cloth sacks. When had he stopped breathing? I watched as he felt his neck with blackened fingers, hunting for a heart beat. He frowned. Gathering his courage he slid a finger between two exposed ribs on his left side and felt around inside. The Captain withdrew dry fingers, collapsed boneless into a chair, and stared unblinking at the wall.

  Weren’t Cotardists supposed to die when their putrefaction reached such an advanced state?

  Gods, I wished we had someone to talk to.

  The next day the fog cleared and the crew was treated to a view of long white beaches, tropical trees, and bronze-skinned men and women glittering gold in the sun. Captain Pizarr joked to me that he hoped the sight of scantily clad young women would push the crew over the edge. He then ordered the men to remain on board. He selected a small crew—myself and four large men well versed in violence with the morals of hold rats—to man the row boat. Even after months at sea I couldn’t remember the names of his four killers.

  As the row boat approached the shore, my breath caught in my chest as I realized what I was seeing. I glanced at Pizarr but he seemed distracted, lost in thought.

  “Captain, that’s gold. All of it.”

  Pizarr squinted. Were his eyes fading as well? What a terrifying thought. Would he someday go blind as he rotted away?

  The men and women on the shore were dressed in sheets of red and gold. Bands of gold wrapped their limbs and hung from wrists and ankles. It was even worked into their hair.

  “That’s not possible,” said Pizarr. “There isn’t that much gold.”

  I wanted to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder but dared not touch him. “It’s... I’m sure it’s gold.” A thought occurred to me. “Captain, are we going to be able to communicate with these people?”

  “The King said I would be capable,” answered Pizarr. Furimmer had said much the same to me on that day he asked me to betray my only friend.

  “Will that work here?” I asked without thinking.

  “I believe so.”

  I understood immediately and nodded. Where my delusions shaped reality, King Furimmer’s defined it. “If the King said it is so, it is so. My question was foolish.”

  Pizarr nodded and my transgression was forgiven and forgotten. In truth I don’t think he cared what I thought. My doubts were nothing when held against the convictions of a Sociocast as powerful as the King.

  The golden savages had gathered where the boat would soon be coming ashore. I looked them over, searching for weapons and seeing none. They were too scantily clad to be hiding anything larger than knives. Now that they were closer, I could make out more detail. The women were beautiful. Long hair the colour of healthy loam and soft dark eyes that weren’t far from black. The men looked fit, lean and muscled like athletes. At this range there was no mistaking that warm glow. These people wore more gold than existed in all of the King’s treasuries. This must be a gathering of the local royalty. But then where were the soldiers, the protectors of such important people? The apparent lack of weapons did nothing to ease my tension. An unarmed man with the right delusions can destroy cities. Of this I am living proof, for I burned Ausfal.

  Captain Pizarr leaned towards me and spoke quietly. “Be wary. If I give you the word, burn them all.”

  Oh gods, please, please let me burn. Something of my hunger must have shown in my toothy grin because Pizarr backed away with a nervous look. My only friend shied from me. It was like a kick in the stomach. This small, soft betrayal mirrored my own treachery and fanned the devouring flames within me. All too aware of my pronounced canines, I grinned at him again in an effort to hide the sick loneliness twisting my gut.

  Please let me burn.

  The boat came to shore gently and Pizarr’s four killers leapt out and dragged it onto the soft sands. When Pizarr and I stepped from the boat we didn’t get our feet wet.

  Though the natives were well muscled, they were dwarfed by the four monstrous men. They babbled in their native tongue and Pizarr stood, unblinking, staring at them. I think it took him a moment to realize he understood what they were saying
. The Captain shrugged and stepped forward raising his hands to show his empty palms. He’d left his sword back in his cabin. He was useless with it anyway.

  “I bring you greetings from King Furimmer of Grauchloss.” Pizarr spoke carefully and clearly in their language.

  The savages, silent and rigid, stared at us. The eldest marshalled his distaste at our appearance and stepped forward. He bowed low.

  “Welcome to our shores. High King Hualpa rules here.” The savage, staring out at our massive ship anchored a few hundred feet from the shore, looked uncertain. “Are you... are you gods?”

  I could clearly see he was very much hoping we were not. It was, however, too much of an opportunity for Pizarr to pass up.

  “Yes,” said the Captain. “We are gods from distant lands, vassals of King Furimmer, first amongst gods.”

  For the first time I wished Pizarr was a better liar. Counsellor Reizung would have been useful now. Ah well, no use crying over spilled blood.

  “You look like men. You smell like men.” The other savages laughed.

  Pizarr turned to me. “Burn them all,” he said in our language. “Leave one alive.” He glanced at the chuckling savages. “Not the old man.”

  Release.

  A high-pitched keening like that of an over-excited dog escaped my clenched teeth. Then the savages were screaming. I was only barely aware of Pizarr watching with detached disinterest as their flesh turned angry red and then boiled away from their bones. The screaming choked off as suddenly as it began and the savages were twitching in the sand as their eyes slagged and ran like hot mud. The smell of cooked meat must have reached even Pizarr’s attenuated senses because he wrinkled his nose and backed away another step. More distance between us. Another small betrayal.