Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

Jen slumped, her knees banging hard against the bedroom floor. Kyle’s parents, their jaws still broken and no doubt in terrible pain, hugged their son between them. The boy turned to Jen, eyes blinking away the salt and sweat. He said something, but no words came out at first, as if he’d misjudged how used-up his vocal cords were.

The second time she heard him.

“I like that song,” he said. “Could you play it again?”

I sensed him before he spoke. Sensed trouble, too.

“Why aren’t you at the party, Sulien?” said a gravelly voice I hadn’t heard since I was a kid and didn’t want to hear now. Too many memories. Most of them bad.

“Xervish Flydd,” I said, without turning around. I was in my studio, trying to take a print from one of my copper etching plates, and it wasn’t going well. “And older and uglier than ever, I’ll bet.”

“I was an ugly young man, even before that unfortunate episode in the scrutators’ torture chambers,” he said cheerily. “Hardly likely I’d improve with age. Turn around.”

“Why?” I snapped.

“I want to see how you’ve turned out.”

I sighed and wiped my inky hands on a rag. I hadn’t seen Flydd since I was nine, sixteen years ago. He hadn’t changed. Still a little, skinny man. Still grotesquely ugly, even when smiling, as now. But charming, nonetheless. It was hard not to smile at him, but I managed it.

“You didn’t grow much,” he said, gaunt head cocked to one side.

“Neither did you.” Feeble!

“What happened to your beautiful hair?”

“Gets in the way.” I raked my fingers through the loose curls, doubtless smearing black ink everywhere. It was thick and sticky and I was covered in it to the elbows. “What do you want?”

“We’re missing you at the reunion.”

“What’s to celebrate?” I muttered. “We live in a blighted world. Nothing’s gone right since the day we won.”

“There’s plenty to celebrate. We defeated an invasion by the bloodiest race ever to come rampaging out of the void. We saved a world from genocide at their hands. And we delivered Skald and his Merdrun nation to justice, something they never gave any of their victims. Especially poor Uletta.”

We had buried her on a mound by the stream, not far away. I hadn’t known her well, but the ghastly way she had been killed would never leave me. “Well, yes, but—”

“We paid a high price, Sulien. It’s important that we get together occasionally, acknowledge our dead and their sacrifices, and support our old friends.”

“I don’t want to relive that time—the nightmares do it for me.” I turned back to my bench.

“Well, I’m afraid you have to come with me,” said Flydd.

“Am I under arrest? Are you going to drag me to the damned reunion?”

“No.” The good cheer was gone. He sounded uneasy, and that was troubling, because Flydd had seen everything, and survived what few others had. “Something’s happened and we need you.”

I dropped the copper plate, which rang on my marble-topped workbench. “Is it Dad? Is he all right? He hasn’t been well—”

“Llian’s fine… apart from an excess of wine and good cheer. Everyone at the reunion is fine—or would be if you were there.”

“Then what is it?”

“Your kinswoman, Malien, mind-called from Aachan a few minutes ago. I’ve got to make a portal there right away, and I need you to come with me.”

Now he had my attention. “We have to go to another world ? How?”

Flydd held up a small, irregularly shaped black stone that I recognized at once, because it glowed crimson in the center. “Lirriam lent me her Waystone.”

“Why do you want me?”

“You knew the Merdrun—and Skald— better than anyone.”

“I was only nine. I didn’t know anything.”

“You discovered the enemy’s fatal weakness and it helped to defeat them. We need your aid.”

“What for?”

“To solve a mystery that Malien’s people are unable, or unwilling, to investigate.”

“Am I allowed to clean myself up first?”

“The dead don’t care how you look.”

What was that supposed to mean? “But I do.”

I wiped the worst of the ink off my hands and arms, went into the back room and put on a green shirt, baggy black trews and brown boots. The mirror showed ink smears on my face, which I scrubbed off, and black clots in my dark red hair. Nothing I could do about that.

“Let’s get it over with,” I said when I came out. “Got work to do.”

We went outside. Flydd closed a fist around the Waystone, extended his right hand and I took hold. The bones were twisted and lumpy; they had been broken in the torture chamber and had not healed straight. He tapped the Waystone on a platinum ring, inscribed with black glyphs, that gleamed on his middle finger.

I’d been through a number of gates and portals in my time, and none of them were pleasant. There was no visible manifestation of this one—no hole in the air or dimensional opening of any kind—but I began to shudder so violently that I thought my teeth were going to vibrate out of my gums, and my stomach tried to explosively eject its contents.

I clamped down hard and clung onto his hand. Portals sometimes went wrong and people using them ended up between , wherever that was. Nowhere one could come back from.

We fell through an airless nothingness lit by pulses of orange light. My chest heaved, wanting air. Don’t breathe out, you’ll never get it back . Then we were falling in the real world, about six feet through frigid air. I bent my knees and landed on black rock crusted with snow the color of sulfur. The top of a ridge. A small red sun glowed in a mauve sky. Aachan.

I gagged but managed to prevent myself from throwing up.

Flydd, a few yards away, clutched his belly and grimaced. “Doesn’t get any easier.”

“You took your time,” said a very old woman seated in the middle of a platform twenty yards away.

I barely recognized Malien. Her back was bent and her hair, once almost as red as my own, was so thin and colorless that I could see her scalp through it. The voice was the same, though, and the sharp tongue. And the very long Aachim fingers, twice the length of her palm.

I looked the other way, over a precipice and down into a massive crater whose upper walls were sheer, unclimbable cliffs. The ink-clotted hair on the top of my head stirred. I knew where we were. But why were we here?

Had they escaped?

“Of all the decisions I’ve made in my long life,” said Malien, “this is the one I regret most.”

“Allowing us to send the Merdrun to prison here?” said Flydd.

“Why couldn’t you have dealt with them on Santhenar?”

It was an old argument. “They were already going through their portal, thinking they were invading their long-lost home-world. We had to trick them and send them to another world, and Aachan was the only one we could reach.”

“I fell out with my people over it,” said Malien. “And even on my death bed, which is comfortably close now, we won’t be reconciled. A hard thing, that.”

“I’m truly sorry,” said Flydd. “But needs must.”

She rose, supporting herself on a black metal cane with intricate silver tracery down its length. Symbols that meant nothing to me.

“We sentenced them to thirty years servitude,” said Malien. “A modest punishment, considering the ruin they visited on so many other peoples over the eons, and the utter lack of mercy they showed to anyone. If they worked hard to restore this desolation, and submitted to moral instruction, and changed at the end of thirty years, they would have been freed.”