World Enough, and Time. FastPencil Premiere
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returned Josh. Beauty ran in the direction of Moorelli’s farm, while Joshua headed into the wood.
Josh knew something was amiss as soon as he neared the cabin. Not a sound, not a movement. No Ollie playing, no Mother singing. He dropped to one knee and listened. Only a mockingbird, mocking.
Joshua put down the squirrel he’d been carrying and slipped a knife out of his belt. He waited. Still nothing. He ran silently through the trees around to the front of the house, to try to get a look in through the west windows.
What he saw was that there was no door. And when he looked past the doorway into the main room, his insides twisted tight.
He ran into the house, knife in hand, and looked around desperately. Dead, all dead. He sucked in his breath, trying to take in the scene. Mother, Father, Grandma, Jack. All horribly mutilated, irrevocably dead. He knelt by his mother’s side, his eyes filled with tears. He held her hand. Cold, stiff.
There was a noise in the corner. Joshua swiveled with knife out, all his fury and grief concentrated instantaneously in the steel blade. But it was Jack moving, not quite lifeless yet. Josh ran over to the old man and held his head up.
“Uncle Jack, what happened?” He wanted to say more, but his voice wouldn’t work, his throat was constricted, and dry as his eyes were wet.
Jack looked up at him. “Joshua, is it you, boy? I’m dyin’, boy. Word help me.”
Joshua shook him gently. “Jack, who did this?”
Jack focused a little. “Two monsters and a bloodsucker, boy. I tried, I tried…”
“What about Dicey and Ollie? What about Dicey?”
“Carried ‘em off,” whispered the old man. “I’m dead, boy.”
“What did they look like?” persisted Joshua. His despair was already forging grief into hate.
Jack’s voice hardly moved air. Joshua had to lower his ear to the man’s mouth. “One was a lion-hawk. One was a bloodsucker. And one foul thing no man should ever give name to and I thank the Word I’m dyin’ so I’ll never have to remember its face.” He closed his eyes, then, and died.
Joshua ran through the cabin, looking for something, anything. He wanted to run, to fight; he felt, for a moment, as if he were going crazy. He picked up a chair and smashed it repeatedly against the floor, he kicked the wall. Then he sat down on the rug and cried and cried and cried.
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When he finished burying them, he sat down at the table in the main room and stared into the cold fireplace. He felt hollow, but somehow clean. Purposeful. His life to this minute was over: his life from now on had commenced.
He pulled the quill from his boot and dipped it in the tin of ink he’d just mixed from ashes, dried blood, and water. On the thin paper before him, he methodically wrote:
Here lies the family Green. Old woman Esther, sons Jack and Bob, and Bob’s wife Ellen. All were Humans. Murdered viciously and without provocation by a Griffin, a Vampire, and an Accident, as sworn by dead Jack. Jack’s daughter, Dicey, and Bob’s son, Ollie, abducted by same. Surviving son Joshua, hunter and Scribe, hereby sets the record and claims Venge-right, on this 14th day of March, After the Ice 121.
Joshua Green, Human & Scribe
He slipped the quill back into his boot. He rolled the parchment into a tight cylinder and fitted it into a thin, stainless steel tube, which he sealed at both ends. He had a whole box of these tubes – Scribe-tubes, they were called – stored under the bed. He took two more empties and strapped one to each leg. Finally, he wrote an identical statement on another paper and secreted that one in his belt.
He went outside and dug one last hole among the four graves he’d just laid. The day was dimming, he was tired. He felt an oppressive need for sleep coming over him. Soon he would rest from his ordeal.
When his hole was two feet deep, he dropped in the paper-filled tube and began to cover it over. He had to stop momentarily, as another wave passed over him, a pressing, physical need for sleep. He closed his eyes. The absence of visual input relieved his dizziness somewhat; but the sense of sleep pressure was replaced by a discrete pinpoint of light, deep inside his internal field of vision. It seemed far away, this tiny bright spot, but it tugged at him, exerting a gentle pull, like a cool draft sucking softly down a well, like static electricity, like the ambivalent gravity of a first kiss.
He opened his eyes. The sun was almost down. He finished filling in his hole and marked the place with a wood marker bearing the standard symbol of the Scribe – a snake twisting inside a circle – which he carved into the wood. Only then did he notice the black smoke rising ten miles to the north. He stared at it dumbly for a few moments, then whispered the dreadful realization: “Beauty’s farm.”
Grimly, he started running.
Joshua was a hunter, which meant it was not rare for him to run two or three hours without pause; so he reached Beauty’s farm easily in less than an hour. He needn’t have hurried.
The farmhouse itself was razed, smoldering in its own charcoal. Beauty stood staring, weeping mutely into the rubble. He was at once majestic and beaten.
Josh walked over to the Centaur, his own anger and sorrow fed anew by those of his friend. There was shared grief, a new bond between them. And shared hatred, the strongest bond, perhaps, of all. They were compatriots, now, in the land of loss.
He told Beauty his story, what he’d found at home. Beauty told Joshua he’d returned to the farm an hour earlier and found… this. Rose was gone; no trace of Human remains in the ashes. The one thing Beauty had found, near the house, was Rose’s knife, sticky with blood.
“But it wasn’t Human blood, I know that smell well,” said the Horse-man. “It was vile blood.” He squinted back his tears, his venom.
Josh nodded. “Jack said one of the creatures was what sounded like an Accident.” They couldn’t look at each other.
Beauty held up Rose’s bloody knife. “A wounded Accident, now.” He threw the knife into the dirt.
Some feet away, beneath a broken board, Josh saw a Falcon feather. He picked it up, and they both stared at it with burning eyes. It was all that remained of Rose.
“I’ll take it for my quill,” said Josh. “It’ll give us power to find her, if I use it to write with.” He cut the tip into a quill point with his knife, and stuck the newly fashioned pen into his boot, replacing his old one with it.
Beauty did not believe in the power of Scribery as did Josh, but he knew that from this time on, whatever resources they could tap, whatever powers they could individually draw upon, they would need.
They looked at each other a moment, and the moment was theirs. Joshua set the record, marked it with his sign, and the two young hunters made a plan.
In Which It Is Seen That Time Is A River Which May Briefly Stop, Yet Then Moves On
THE hills of Monterey formed a promontory on the tip of a crooked finger of land that pointed southwest into the blue Pacific. The base of the peninsula curved gently back to a coastline that ran east, then smoothly south all the way to Port Fresno. From Fresno the coast turned east again, and then south once more down to Newport, near what once had been the Mexican border. Of course, since the last war there were no more borders; only frontiers.
Beauty’s farm lay in the southern meadows of a depopulated area that extended north to the Ice Country. The Ice Country itself was uninhabitable: a vast, frigid zone, the penumbra of a glacier that sat snugly on the top third of the world like