Darker Realms, page 1
Contents
Introduction: Diving into the Darkness
Allyson Longueira
Lost in the Tarnished Cube
Thomas K. Carpenter
Myrtle’s Boxes
Louisa Swann
Old Magics
Steven Mohan, Jr.
Sky in the Ground
Rob Vagle
The Gleaming Crater
Thea Hutcheson
Destiny
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Barbarians
David Farland
The Witch’s House
Richard Bowes
About the Editor
Copyright Information
Introduction
Diving into the Darkness
Allyson Longueira
I vividly remember one of my first forays into a darker realm. It was a short story by Stephen King called “The Eyes of the Dragon.” I remember it in part because I was so surprised it was a King story (and thus the myth that an author sticks to one genre was shattered early).
Still, I didn’t really become a fantasy reader until I discovered Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. And even then, I only read Brooks. It would be many years until I would dive into vast unrecognizable worlds like Middle Earth, the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the Blue Isle…
But once you take that leap...you realize the number of worlds at your fingertips are endless. And, I mean, who doesn’t love dragons.
Thus, I offer you this third volume of Fiction River Presents: Darker Realms.
When we conceived of this series, I knew high fantasy would comprise a volume. And I knew Thomas K. Carpenter’s “Lost in a Tarnished Cube” would lead it off.
Tom starts us off on our journey by presenting a real-world problem in a magical realm. And he offers a solution that is as complex as it is creative.
We go from a mage’s tower to another story of trapped souls, only this time the clever Louisa Swann puts a magical spin on hearing voices. And a compassionate take on exorcising demons, of a sort.
Next, Steven Mohan, Jr., gives us a different kind of demon to exorcise. Dragons, unicorns, mobsters, feds… Steven mixes the real world and old magic in unexpected and fascinating ways.
From there, Rob Vagle gives us our final taste of the real world before Thea Hutcheson returns us solidly to other realms. And the realms get darker….
Our next story in this volume marks a departure from our usual reprint story options. But I couldn’t publish a high fantasy reprint volume without including the Fey.
“Destiny” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch gives critical backstory into one of the main characters in that rich and compelling world. The reason this story is unusual, however, is that it was not published in Fiction River…until now. But be warned, you’ll be hooked into series you won’t be able to put down.
Speaking of hooking you into a series, our next-to-last story is another prequel, this time for David Farland’s New York Times bestselling series, the Runelords. “Barbarians” is a powerful tale set a thousand years before the rest of this epic series.
Our final foray into the darker realms is the darkest of our stories. Richard Bowes “The Witch’s House” will punch you in the gut. It was featured in our first-ever volume, Unnatural Worlds, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Just like that long-ago Stephen King fantasy story, the best ones stick with you.
I hope you enjoy this volume. I certainly enjoyed putting it together.
—Allyson Longueira
Lincoln City, Oregon
May 9, 2016
Introduction to “Lost in the Tarnished Cube”
I was drawn to this first story from the moment I read it for Recycled Pulp, where it was originally published. Part of the attraction, for me, was the thought that even mages find some of the responsibilities of home ownership to be onerous chores. Add in the delightful intricacies of legal contracts in the fantasy realm, and Thomas K. Carpenter had me hooked.
Thomas writes in diverse genres, including: YA dystopia, post-cyberpunk sci-fi, steampunk, historical fantasy, and alternate history. His latest series, the Alexandrian Saga, has garnered rave reviews from readers and critics. He has appeared in three volumes of Fiction River: Pulse Pounders, Recycled Pulp and Sparks. His bestselling novels and short stories can be found at all major online retailers. Find out more at thomaskcarpenter.com.
Of this tale, he says: “Before I wrote this story, I’d been reviewing a contract and reading the fine print for onerous clauses. It’s amazing what people try to sneak into a contract. As you’ll see from the story, the legal contracts of our world are nothing compared to a fantasy world full of demons, undead, and other supernatural creatures. Buyer beware, and always read the full contract. Your soul might be in danger.”
Lost in the Tarnished Cube
Thomas K. Carpenter
Danai broke the sky when her birds didn’t return home. Crystalline shards the size of war banners fell from the grayish-black clouds that had smelled like rain until now. What replaced it was the smell of a long forgotten attic.
She huddled under the carnifex tree, rocking on her rear and sucking her thumb. After a time, she thrust her slender fingers beneath the gnarled roots that spread like tentacles from the towering tree. Grubs and worms wriggled from the black dirt she upturned, less vigorously than they had in years past.
Soon, she came to her prize. The fist-sized rock she wrestled from the soil had a pleasing weight and one end that came to a point, much like a well-crafted arrow.
With salty tears leaving glistening trails down her face, Danai sliced her palm open from the webbing between her fingers to the edge of her spirit line. The only sign of pain was a brief flinch at the corner of her lips. She studied the blood beading up like crimson jewels along the cut.
With lips suctioned to her palm, she sucked on the salty blood until the wound stitched together of its own accord. The new flesh was pale, almost translucent—and disappointing. There was a time when no trace of the cut would have remained. That time seemed many ages ago.
Danai stretched against the comforting trunk of the carnifex tree and stared at the sky through the arched and leafless branches until her neck ached. Then she curled her knees to her chest, placed her forehead to her knees and waited.
She’d been waiting a long time.
And waiting.
And waiting.
***
The mage sucked on a swollen blister on the palm of his hand. Owning an honest-to-goodness tower had been a dream of his since he first took up the spellcasting arts, but never in his thirty-seven years would he have thought cleaning it would have been so hard.
Leaning on the broom, Vance surveyed the bottom floor, cluttered with old rolled tapestries, a pair of ancient wooden desks, worn and nicked with use and covered with vials of all shapes and sizes and colored contents, a petrified arm of a goblin wrapped with copper wire, a giant tongue suspended in a translucent vat, and other sundry items that he had yet to identify, all under a thick blanket of dust. It seemed that despite his days of labor, he was still no further along than when he had first arrived.
Shifting his weight, his elbow disturbed an armoire, depositing a plume of dust on his shoulder that made Vance sneeze, sending up a geyser of motes that swirled away from him in the morning light. Dust. The cleaning was going infinitely slower than he’d expected, mainly because he was terrified of using a cleaning spell due to the magical artifacts left behind by the mage that had previously owned the tower. The mixing of incompatible energies could end his dream of owning a tower faster than it’d began—not to mention his life—so he had to clean it by hand.
But that was the price of purchasing a previously owned piece of real estate. Building a new one was strictly cost prohibitive. It’d taken years of mundane spell casting—routine luck boons and wart erasing stuff that a swamp witch could handle—to scratch together enough gold for the down payment.
And it might turn out to be a wiser investment than he had first thought. If he was any judge of magical energies, the tower’s contents could be worth more than the building itself. The old wizard had mysteriously disappeared about seventy years ago. The townsfolk assumed he’d run afoul of a demon, or other such grotesque beast, and it’d only been until five years ago that they’d repossessed the tower and put it up for sale.
Vance just wished they’d left everything in its place rather than hauling it all to the bottom floor. The townsfolk, ignorant of the danger, had thought it wasn’t selling because it was too cluttered, and had been preparing to throw it all out when he’d shown up.
Just thinking of the potential loss made him shudder, then smile at his luck in arriving in time. There was the matter of the loan from the Bank of Greytomb, but he hoped that selling a few choice items might satisfy those financial predators since, in his haste to occupy the tower, he’d signed an unfavorable contract that would come due much sooner than he’d like.
Vance prepared to dive back into his war against the dust when he heard a polite knock on the door, almost a brushing of knuckles against wood rather than a percussive sound. Leaning the broom against a tangled pile of antlers, he headed to the door.
Outside on the stone platform stood an older woman with streaks of gray shooting through her dirty blond hair, crow’s feet stamped into the corners of her eyes, and flattened lips that reminded him of a school matron.
“May I help you?” he asked.
Vance had never been a part of any military organization, but if he had, he thought that standing for inspection might have been similar to how the woman’s severe gaze traveled up his dust-covered robes to rest on his face. The corners of her lips ticked downward, adding a new set of wrinkles to her sagging jowls.
“You’re not what I expected,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain.
“Few are,” said Vance with an eyebrow raised.
The woman’s forehead knotted as she briefly wrestled with his comment, only to shake it off and forge ahead. She tilted her head to gaze past him and then bunched her lips into a scowl.
“Despite my misgivings about your appearance, I’ve come to fill the role of your housekeeper,” she said with her hands clasped in front of her.
Vance let a breath of mirth pass through his parted lips. “I’m afraid you must be mistaken. I have no need of a housekeeper.”
The woman snorted, jutting her chin out. “It’s as clear as this summer day that you need a housekeeper. You haven’t the faintest idea how to clean, and I can see the new blisters on your hands.”
Vance found himself begrudgingly agreeing with her, but he had no spare coin to pay her. “I’m afraid there’s no position open at the moment,” he said. “Once my affairs are in order, I might begin an interview process. But I must warn you, my requirements are quite strict.” In his mind, he pictured a long legged, busty housekeeper with auburn hair and a smile that could put a dragon at ease.
The old woman stiffened. “I can’t imagine you do. Why, you hardly look like a proper mage. Short, chubby, with greasy hair. And look at you, you’ve got acne. The wizards of my youth were tall and grand, like a majestic castle. A proper mage would have snapped his fingers and the tower would have cleaned itself. You’re just a whelp.”
“Then why would I need you?” Vance asked.
The woman harrumphed, shook her head, and marched down the moss-covered stone steps back toward town.
With the distraction behind him, Vance took up his broom and began sweeping again. As he turned the gray carpet of dust into neat little mounds, he couldn’t help but ponder the old woman’s words. If he were a better mage, he could snap his fingers and the tower would be clean. This was true. But hasty mages were often dead mages. And the menu of available deaths for a mage was not something to be taken lightly. The wrong waggle of the fingers could result in a tragically painful self-disemboweling. Or a misplaced emphasis on the last syllable of a spell could accidentally relocate oneself to another plane of existence, one quite hostile to careless mages, especially ones with poor diction. Or the thoughtless mixing of magical components could unexpectedly erupt and turn the tower into a smoking heap of slag, mage included.
No, it wouldn’t do any good to take up the woman’s challenge. Though he found himself making slashing motions with the broom when he pictured her.
Greasy hair and acne? Of course I do, he thought. Mages that spent too much time on their appearance rather than studying their tomes end up as the leather vest of a demon lord.
Vance was wiping sweat off his forehead when there came another knock on the door. He marched over, broom in hand, and flung it open, preparing to launch into an expletive-infused diatribe when he realized it was not the woman who wanted to be his housekeeper.
“Vance Amberlinks, mage of Winter Hollow?” asked the slender, pale man dressed in an azure frock coat filled with gold buttons.
It wasn’t until Vance noticed the dark circles around the man’s eyes did he realize who he was, but by then it was too late; he was already nodding, agreeing to the question of identity. Not that the opposite answer would have given him any succor.
“Mr. Bonefile, from the Bank of Greytomb. How nice to see you again,” said Vance, massaging the back of his neck with one hand.
Mr. Bonefile blinked once, paused, and blinked again. Vance was sure this extravagant display of emotions from the banker was a record, and also a foreboding sign of things to come.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Bonefile, his tone almost a question. “But I did not come here for long, personal exchanges.”
Vance swallowed and his stomach churned like butter. There was a slight chance the banker was standing outside his tower because there was some clerical error they had to fix. But the bankers of Greytomb—besides having preserved themselves with alchemical embalming poultices that stunk like formaldehyde and imbued them with terribly long lives—were known for their diligence, and Vance suddenly had castles full of regret landing on his shoulders for not having hired a lawyer to vet his loan documents.
The banker reached into his vest pocket with the torpor of the grave, producing a tightly rolled parchment. He methodically unrolled it, as if peeling away skin, and began reading from the contract.
“I, Vance Sunflower Amberlinks, currently residing in Winter Hollow—”
Vance noisily cleared his throat and glanced around making sure no one was listening. He would have left his middle name off had it not been on the town records. He waved his hand. “There’s no need for a reading of the full contract. I assume there’s some issue with it, hence your visit. Just get to the salient points, if you please.”
Mr. Bonefile’s chin sank until he found the correct portion of the contract and began reading again: “And the sum of the original loan plus interest will come due at a time seven years after the signing based on the calendar of record. If the signee cannot pay, then the matter will be resolved by the Guild of Infernal Bondsmen.”
“Yes, yes,” said Vance. “Seven years. I fail to see the importance of that section. It’s only been two months since the signing date.”
“In section eighteen, article five, footnote number three point one, the calendar of record is stated as the one used by the Bank of Greytomb.”
Vance remembered that section. He’d read the whole thing a dozen times to make sure there were no hidden traps in the legal language. Since the contract was magically binding, he knew he had to be careful. The Bank of Greytomb was notorious for quasi-ethical contract language. But they were the undead, so that was to be expected.
“And?”
“The calendar of record for the Bank of Greytomb is the one used in the infernal lands,” said Mr. Bonefile.
“That wasn’t in the contract.”
Mr. Bonefile blinked again. “No. But in our bank charter, the usage of such calendar is stated for all to see.”
Vance swallowed, hard.
“So when is my loan due?”
“Seven days hence. The contract states we must give you this warning if the payment isn’t made by then,” said Mr. Bonefile.
Vance placed both hands to his temples. He thought he’d never even have to worry about that warning.
“Yes, seven days…” he mumbled.
“If the gold is not delivered to our bank by then, we shall turn the matter over to the Guild of Infernal Bondsmen for collection. Is this understood?”
Numbly, Vance nodded.
The banker left, and Vance returned inside and slumped against the wall until his elbows were on his knees and his forehead was in his hands. Seven days.
He started to hyperventilate.
Seven days.
He looked around the room. Seven days. Surely he could find something of value in the tower in seven days.
But not if he was cleaning it by hand.
For a moment, Vance considered contracting the woman from town. He shuddered. The dangers inherent to magical cleaning weren’t nearly as abhorrent as spending time in close quarters with her.
He rose to his feet, unsteadily at first, but straightened and took a deep breath.
Seven days.
If he was quick, but careful, he could make it.
Vance formed the patterns in his mind that he would need for the cleaning spell. Then he pulled his dust-covered sleeves back, stretched his fingers once for limberness, and prepared to cast.
***
Danai waited in the valley beneath the hill where the carnifex tree stood. The looped and knotted rope hung from a long, naked limb, swaying in the gentle breeze.
