short stories
Notes on the Necromantic Symphony
Few reliable records have survived of the premiere of Mrod Zogorith’s last and greatest work, the Symphony No. 36 in Mode 9. Zogorith herself vanished after the performance, and morbid rumors in its wake caused the wags to dub it the Necromantic Symphony. It is likelier that Zogorith fled the region during the subsequent Siege of Taruon, or was killed.
The Inferno
Jenna Freeman was beginning to think that she should have listened to her sister before she bought the new viola. It wasn’t that she was superstitious. But the instrument had survived two fires—it still had scarring on its ribs—and the last owner had nicknamed it the Inferno. Jenna’s sister had said, “Don’t you think that’s a bad omen? It’ll inspire a new category of viola jokes.” Only half-listening, Jenna had played a transposed fragment of a Bach partita and was entranced by the Inferno’s tone. It sounded like dark chocolate and red satin ribbons and all things shadowy, exactly the way a viola should be. After that, there was no way not to buy the Inferno.
The Shadow Postulates
Kaela Navus was reading a beginners’ sword-dancing manual when a hand descended upon her own, blotting out the diagram. She looked up, mouth opening in protest, only to have the scroll plucked from her grip and rolled shut. The black lines faded into ricepaper-white. “Teris!” Kaela said.
Her roomsister, Teris Tascha, set the scroll down on the escritoire out of Kaela’s reach. “You won’t learn the pattern for the Swallow Flies Home from a diagram,” she said. “It has to live in your muscles.”
Screamers
“Pigeon or canary?”
Cadet Serren Psora halted before the entrance to the briefing room and blinked up at the gaunt. She hadn’t realized how many bones you could see in such a translucent face. “Sir?” she said.
The gaunt’s upper lip curled away from his silvery teeth. No, not silvery; more a shimmer, as though he weren’t all there. Which, of course, he wasn’t. “Too polite to act bright, is that it?” he asked.
Hopscotch
You’re far from the homestar, on the run from the big guns. You think of the places burned behind you: forked glassy structures with their petal-sails spread toward the more assertive of twin stars, the girl-woman with the peony eyes you left after a single bowered night, the weapons (guns, guns, guns) with your name inscribed on them in sixteen languages. Your faces.
Unstringing the Bow
There are secret places in the world, and our maze was one of them. Sometimes a queen or an astrologer or a poet will follow some inward silence and find our maze; sometimes a king or architect or musician will follow some outward cacophony and seek our maze, and we must hide ourselves.
So That Her High-Born Kinsmen Came
Listen. This is how it is in hell, how your mothers and grandmothers have told it, how your fathers and grandfathers have tallied it. Listen. This is how the tides of hell will number and outnumber you, and how you must drink the dregs of that sea.
Nine Tails, Hundred Hearts
Yeng knew many things about foxes. He knew the russet of their fur and the soft marks their feet left in rotting leaves. He knew the stink of their urine and the feral amber of their eyes. He knew that the gumiho, the nine-tailed foxes, ate livers or hearts, or sometimes both, when they sought to become human.
The Sun’s Kiss
The queen in her dark halls kept a mirror of ice that had never known the sun’s kiss. Within it was frozen a maiden with paler lips, sweeter eyes. A man appeared in the mirror’s cold depths. The queen breathed over its surface, erasing his reflection, and turned. Waited.