Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (3 page)

       
In years to come, she would captain a ship called the
Keenly Cutting Mirror
, and fill books with her own sestinas and sijo, each with a scattering of pages left deliberately blank, each notable for how it evoked scenes as much by what was omitted as by what was included.
 
Readers in times to come knew her poetry by those tomes; scholars sought patterns in the pages.
 
When her own children asked her the meaning of those empty spaces, she gathered them into her arms and recited children’s verse, nonsense rhymes, random words in alphabetical order.

       
The older children did not understand.
 
But the youngest smiled up at her and said her name to her, and that was good enough.

dedicated to Cassandra

Copyright © 2009 Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee's short fiction has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
and
Clarkesworld Magazine
.
 
Her story “Architectural Constants” appeared in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #2
.
She currently lives in Pasadena, California with her husband and daughter.

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

SONGDOGS

by Ian McHugh

       
The True Moon and its False companion hung full in the sky, lighting the night so bright Agnieska could hardly see the stars. The True Moon smiled down like a senile old man. The False Moon rippled like a reflection on water. Out across the dry plain of mulga and saltbush scrub, the songdogs warbled.

       
Agnieska shivered and looked back at her prisoner. Carrick’s eyes were half-lidded but fixed on her, she was certain, rather than on the ground in front of his feet. He sported a patchy coating of brick-red dust from the tumbles he’d taken on the uneven ground. The split in his forehead that she’d given him with her pistol butt had swollen up into a knotted bruise, evident through his mop of black hair. The bottom half of his face was hidden by the tongue clamp she’d put on him. His hands were locked into lead mittens, both hooped to the chain she led him by. She’d been surprised by his age, at least two decades her junior. But then, she supposed, rebellion was the province of the young.

       
A dry creek intersected their path. Agnieska gave the chain a tug, changing direction to skirt a patch of wait-a-while grass growing down over the opposite bank.

       
“This way,” she said, when Carrick continued straight ahead. His head wobbled slightly as he stopped and looked around for her in momentary bemusement.

       
He’d taken longer to get up each time he’d fallen, but Agnieska wasn’t convinced he was as exhausted as he seemed. The compulsion she’d scratched into the soles of his feet, before shoving them into his boots, didn’t force him to watch his step, nor catch himself if he stumbled.

       
So far, she’d stayed her hand from supplementing the spell. The songdogs worried her, though, even if the pack’s cries were a way off yet and a fair distance from their backtrail. She worried more about Carrick’s mates, who certainly
were
on their trail.
 
They’d got away to a good start before the telltale spell she’d cut on the back of his hotel room door had chimed faintly in her ear. They were making reasonable time, too, despite Carrick’s falls. But she worried.

       
Aggie-worry
, Olly used to say.

       
She led Carrick along the eroded bank, examining the creek bed in the moonlight. It was furrowed with flood channels and littered with rocks and small debris, but no patches of smooth sand that might indicate a jack-o-box lurking underneath.

       
He slipped going down the bank, despite Agnieska’s efforts to keep him upright. He knocked her off balance, too, and caught her a painful blow on the breast with his elbow as they slithered to the bottom. Carrick landed on top. He pressed the mittens onto her chest as he scrambled up, squashing the breath from her lungs. Agnieska got her arm in the way of his clumsy swing at her head, yelped as she caught the blow on the point of her elbow. Carrick staggered away, trying to run. His escape lasted only a handful of paces before the compulsion spell stopped him and he sprawled once again in the dust.

       
Agnieska surged to her feet, her patience shot. With a snarl, she kicked him over onto his back. From her coat pocket she took a pair of steel-bladed calf hooks.

       
A lot of sheriffs used the things as a matter of course. To Agnieska they had always seemed a step too far. And she hated forcing a man to endure what her Olly had suffered through. But her blood was up, now, and she grabbed his shirtfront to shake him. Moonlight glinted off the spells etched into the ugly curved blades as she held them in front of his face.

       
“You know what these are?” She shook him again. His eyes went from the hooks to her. His breath rasped painfully behind the tongue clamp. He nodded. Agnieska stood back.

       
“Get up,” she said.

       
He stared at her, unmoving, for long enough that she was certain he’d called her bluff. She could feel her fingers sweating around the hooks. Get up, damn you.

       
At last, he rolled himself onto his side, then awkwardly up on his knees and, at second attempt, to his feet. Agnieska picked up the chain and turned away before he could catch any sign of relief on her face. Her heart clattered inside her ribs. If he
was
less dazed than he acted, he must’ve known he wouldn’t achieve anything more than exhausting her patience. But would he really risk having the hooks put into his legs—making every step a torture while they forced him to walk far beyond his normal endurance—just to test her mettle?

       
She had to lean on the chain to get him up the other side of the creek bed. Carrick grunted at the added pressure on his compressed fingers, but followed.

       
Up ahead, the low roll of the desert plain crinkled up into old granite hills, painted with horizontal stripes of age and sparsely capped by stands of twisted eucalypts. Nearer at hand, the stone chimney of a long-gone farmstead rose alone above the scrub. On the far side of the hills lay the railway and the fortress towns it served.

       
The wait-a-while patch rustled as they passed, although there wasn’t much breeze. It looked like wild wheat, but its ears were full of fishhook barbs. Hidden beneath were leach-mouthed creepers that’d slither up out of the ground and into a person’s clothes.

       
The grass was a thing of the False Moon, like the songdogs, the jack-o-boxes, and the rest. Used to be, the most dangerous thing a person was likely to encounter out bush was dingos, or the occasional mob of unfriendly natives, unless they were unlucky enough to lay out their bed roll on top of a brownsnake. Now the snakes and wild dogs were gone, and the surviving natives had retreated to the towns with everyone else.

       
Used to be, Agnieska reflected upon her tired feet, that a person could ride horseback across the desert, not have to walk. Her grandpapa had learned to ride, growing up in the days before the False Moon came and turned the horses into man-eaters—them and most of the rest of the world.
Used to be
, had been grandpapa’s favorite way of starting a sentence.

       
Even so
, Olly would say, when he got tired of the old man’s complaining,
we’ve got it better than some. At least here men are still ruled over by men
. And he’d stare grandpapa down until the old man subsided, grumbling, into his chair. Then Olly would turn to Agnieska and wink and they’d share a secret grin.

       
The chain in her hand jerked. She turned in time to see Carrick stumble over a spinifex tussock and topple forward, full-length into the dirt.

       
Agnieska swore, reaching into her pocket for the hooks as she kicked him over, determined to use them this time. He twisted awkwardly, the weight of the lead mitts keeping his hands where they were. His head lolled. Agnieska stooped to lift one of his eyelids.

       
Damn. Out cold. She straightened, then unhitched a water canteen, took a swig, and washed the stale water around her teeth while she fretted over the ground their pursuers would gain.

       
In truth, her own legs were shaking with fatigue. And even if Carrick’s mates weren’t just as tired, they couldn’t make up too much ground on foot. But the songdogs were out there, too, still making their presence known.

       
“Not much to be done about it,” she said, aloud. Alone, she would’ve kept going until she found a more defensible site. But it was too late to use the calf hooks now, even if she’d been willing.

       
Too soft, Aggy
, Olly would’ve said.

       
She ran Carrick’s chain through the branches of a stunted mulga tree and padlocked it, then shrugged off her pack to rummage inside for warding irons, which she dotted around in a rough circle. The irons would deflect scrying eyes, now that movement no longer concealed them, and protect them from at least some of the desert’s nocturnal predators. She scattered caltrops and set spring-traps that might do for some of the rest. For whatever else was smart or lucky enough to get through, it was her carbine and the likelihood that Carrick, out in the open, would be attacked first.

       
The ritual of laying out her defenses settled her. And then there was nothing left to do but lie herself down under the low canopy of another mulga, with her pack for a lumpy pillow and her carbine cocked in her hands, and hope that she slept lightly enough to wake in time.

* * *

       
Agnieska came instantly alert but remained still, both habits born of walking the bush alone. She watched through her eyelashes as Carrick stirred. His breath came in sandpaper gasps.

       
Beyond him, the air at the boundary of the warded circle was thickened as though by wisps of mist. The wisps extended limbs, probing the wards for a point of weakness. Riders, more than likely from the abandoned farmstead, seeking a host to sate their yearning for their lost humanity.

       
A gunshot would scatter them, but it would also mark their location for the songdogs and Carrick’s mates. Slowly, Agnieska eased back her coat and slipped a carbine shell from the row on her belt. Carefully, wincing at the creak of her stiff joints, she raised herself onto one elbow so that she could throw. The riders continued their mindless search.

       
She flicked the shell backhand. The lead slug in its brass casing whirled end over end, passing straight through a shadowy figure. The rider popped like a soap bubble. Its companions fled.

       
Agnieska crawled out from under the mulga, reaching back to get her pack. The Moons were low to the west, dawn a couple of hours away. The songdogs were still a distance off as well—too far, yet, for their cries to have any substantial effect. She realized it was too late to be concerning herself about drawing their attention, as their song had changed from repetitive warbling to fluting wails and whistles.