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by Deborah J. Ross, writing as Deborah Wheeler
Fantasy, 13 pages.
Originally Published in MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S FANTASY MAGAZINE, 1996
(1) Rate this Story Day broke along the dragon-crest hills of the Altian Coast. Gulls wheeled overhead and shrieked out hateful names, as if we were the cause of all their sorrows. My partner, Shell, and I had run south last night, along the jagged lands leading to the sea. Our horses, heavy headed, pulled at their bits to steal an occasional mouthful of saltgrass. The pungent smell stirred up things I didn’t want to think about. The run, as usual, had left me twitchy, jumping at shadows, and turned Shell’s uncertain temper foul.
“I want a bath and a fuck.” Shell said fuck because I hated it.
She didn’t mean just men. She asked me once would I and I said no. Nobody touches me, I said.
Now the muted light faded the worst of her face, the seamy jig-dance patterns I knew like my own hand and could never read worth a damn. Even now, I couldn’t tell if she were pissed or horny or just sick in her soul.
I lifted my eyes to the sky, as if I could read some comfort there. A blazing glory had swept out from the east, surging away the last of the hill-cleft darkness. The air shifted, restless. I took a deep breath and let it out, shuddering. In all my years of running, I’d never smelled anything as wild and sweet as the wind from the sea.
Shell’s eyes flickered to the hellhound bitch, pacing beside us, panting, unbreathing. Silver was a thing of magic, made to run where no hound or mastiff ever could. The mages at Alt Lumina fashioned them of metal and crushed sea-pearls, the bones of stillborn boy-children and things it was forbidden to speak of. Silver had served Ereth, Shell’s teacher, before her. The hellhounds ran forever, the light from their eyes a beacon in the night.
Some said the mages labored as penance for a spell gone wrong. Some said that was why the ghost-lights first began to condense in the shadowed cut-up lands along the Altian Coast, to grow and strengthen until we runners drained them off and it was safe for ordinary folk to go out after dark. Some said there was a time when sleep was safe. I knew nothing of these things. The darkness only gave shape to what was already there in men’s hearts. This I knew too well.
We clicked the horses into a jog. In the hell-light of the run, everything looked different, but the horses always brought us where we needed to be. We trusted their greed. Ahead meant town, and town meant hay and brushdown and rest.
Before long, we reached a little trading village, much like any other. Here we would find cod from the sea, flax and winter rye from the plains, mountain copper worked into medallion belts and mage-wire. We crossed a pleasant bridge and rode past the rows of plain frame houses with their familiar curving green-tile roofs, an inn or two touched with yellow paint and potted thyme and false-comfrey, corn silos, pens for goats and hornless dewlapped cattle.
A couple of barefoot kids raced out to gawk at us. In the eave-shadows, I glimpsed a woman with a face pale as flour, men’s eyes gleaming.
The horses stumbled to a walk, their flint-iron shoes clinking on the stones in the dust. Shell and I got down and led them to the trough. My horse thrust its muzzle deep into the gray, scummy water. Its body heaved with its great, gulping swallows.
With her eyes, Shell skimmed the filled pens, the sunken flanks and staring ribs of the animals. The smells of fish and manure hung in the air, but never blended.
“Should have been here last full moon,” I said. “People go crazy, cooped up like this, night after night.”
“It’s too damned much. We can’t cover them all.”
“What? You getting slow, old woman?”
She spat, a wad in the dust. I knew the metallic, bitter taste that filled her mouth. She meant I was right, she was getting old. Old and slow. We both knew the time for her to stop had passed, slipped away like tattered clouds. Somewhere between the nightmares I knew nothing about, she’d kept on running and running and now it was too late. In time, the same thing would happen to me.
My heart shivered in my body, crying out like a stricken child. Shell had made her choice. She wanted no more dreams of any kind. All my life, my choices had been made for me, and still I clung to something I could not put a name to, for fear it might turn out to be hope.
As we stood beside the trough, a shadow passed over Shell, but it was only a cloud in front of the sun. A town man came out, dressed in a jacket trimmed with braided strips of velvet, wool breeches buckled at the knee. He bowed as if his joints had never bent that way before. Maybe Shell knew him. I didn’t. I’d been born in a place like this, but there’s a lot I don’t remember. I run and I rest and eat and sleep and then I run some more.
We followed the man to a barn. Over the doors, the builder had carved his name, -- [End of Preview.]