Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Blood Price
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
I carry in the pocket of my coat a pack of bills. Vampire currency: one hundred thousand-pint notes.
For the last month, I’ve eaten garlic by the clove, raw or baked; garlic fritters; garlic pies; garlic slices on salads of garlic leaves. I’ve washed it all down with a garlic distillation so astringent my lips have permanently puckered back from my teeth.
Which is fine; now everyone can see by the smallness of my incisors what I am and what I am not.
A watcher meets me at the gate. His cloak is billowing as there’s wind, even though the humid air is absolutely still.
“What’s a smiler like you want in here?” he says.
“Tribute to pay.” He flinches at my breath. “In the House of Eight Hands.”
“Lucky them,” says the vampire. “Be quick about it, and be gone.”
I follow the streets I’ve memorized from maps. They only let each of us visit once. The crowd parts, and I reach the palace of the Eight Hands clan in under five minutes.
As I walk through the door, the wood-detector beeps half-heartedly. A guard slouches over and waves a wand up and down. She turns her face away, either because of the amulets all over my clothes or the cloud of garlic scent, and glances up only when the wand shrills at the level of my heart.
I pull out the wad of bills.
“Paper,” I say. “Made of wood. I can leave them outside, if you’d rather…”
“Funny,” she says. “Go.”
I do, down corridors of scarlet and black marble to the throne room.
I don’t rush through the formal statement of thanks for another year of oppressive safekeeping, for not draining too many of us too much too often. I savor the time while I still have a purpose, before I’m another retired pariah shunned by living and undead.
The Night Queen takes the cash, smells it, counts it.
I back away.
I bow low and drop the splinter I’d carried with the money. It joins a hundred years’ of past couriers’ splinters in the hollow between two loose flagstones. In another hundred, a smiler will sneak into the palace with a tube of glue. The next year, a stake will be waiting under the flagstones, and the queen and all her clan will turn to dust.
Something else to think about now I’m retired.
Extracted from Godmother Python’s Bestiary of Wonderful Flowers
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Regional Myths Surrounding the Giant Bellflower.
– The Sunken City: The people of Sesin Town, on Crescent Bay, speak wistfully of the music of lost Mirnaville. Here bellflowers adorned the city crest, and children played in the public gardens in their melodious shade. History verifies that on Saint Sembert’s day, a flood from the sea rose and engulfed the city; folklore alone claims that, in calm weather, the wind carries its chiming from under the waves, bearing it up to the sunlit gardens of Sesin Town, where no bellflowers grow.
– The Cruel Father: A tale local to the Abernath Forest tells of a man who, having allowed his children to starve, was condemned to serve consecutive seven-year terms as a robin, an ocean-going monster (variously described as a dragon, horse, or sea-goat: the Abernath Forest is landlocked), and the clapper-tongue of a bellflower. This, it is said, explains why the father’s voice may be heard mingling with those of his children in the Abernath’s lugubrious vespertine chorus. (While this account is usually considered folkloric, some historians of jurisprudence claim to be able to fit it into the Abernath’s ancestral systems of justice.)
– The Gardener’s Beautiful Daughter: On the Yayang Plateau, the heads of Cithera, a highly respected Botanical Clan, cherish an account of their ancestor the Cleya of Cithera, who was tasked by the Yayang Censorate with producing a bellflower purer of tone than any yet bred. To protect her mother from the consequences of failure, the Cleya’s oldest daughter, after consulting with the Sepeng Oracle, mixed her own blood with the soil. Though debate surrounds the mechanism of the spell, the Yayang bellflower is an undeniably clear-voiced plant, whose ochre markings are (moreover, on occasion) reported to spell surprising words.
– The Three Sisters: In the Culleham Moors their house may still be seen. These women — variously described, according to the storyteller, as having been lovely or plain, reclusive or magnetic, and brilliant or cracked — were unable to get anyone to publish their books. Thus they practiced a form of wild moors magic that is said to have transformed them into either ravens, bellflowers, or men. According to the latter version, the sisters took new names, married, and lived acclaimed and productive lives. According to either of the first two variants, they still dwell on the Culleham Moors, abiding near their former home and confiding their stories to the wind.