Arcane II

Damn
. I look over the table of contents for this edition of the
Arcane
anthology series, and that’s the only word that keeps coming to mind.
Damn
. I don’t know how so many terrific stories made it past the cluttered slushpiles of the top-paying markets in the field to arrive at my virtual door, but I’m glad that those editors and first readers were perhaps asleep at the wheel on the day that these stories passed unnoticed under their glazed eyes and were left for my enjoyment—and now, yours.

If you read the first
Arcane
anthology, you might remember that much of my introduction dwelt, perhaps a little too energetically, on the weaknesses to be found in too many of the themed anthologies on the market, especially those which focus tightly on a sub-sub-subgenre. I bragged at the time that the only common element in the stories presented there was that they were all terrific, but several reviewers did note that the selections in the first Arcane presented... not a sameness, but a complementary nature, and underlying current that all were unable to put their finger on, and few tried.

Looking at the twenty-one stories waiting for you in this volume, I can discover at least a rough label for the commonality between them: every one is something that I wish I had written. And if the only way that I can publish them under my own name is to assemble them into an anthology that I’ve edited, so be it. The next best thing to having written them is having discovered them and presented them to you, feeling like an uncle who can take no credit for his siblings’ children but is proud of them nonetheless.

Fire and Flesh

Michael R. Fletcher

Three months into the voyage the winds died. The sheets hung slack, dejected and flat like the eyes of the crew. The ship had been calmed for a week and tempers were beginning to fray. Captain Pizarr, who had begun showing Cotardist tendencies two weeks out of port, was more literally fraying. At first his fingers had blackened and begun to smell. Now his entire left arm was tattered flesh that showed yellow bone where skin had dried and parted. That the good Captain had taken to picking at the arm and flinging strips of his own rotting flesh overboard did little for the crew’s morale. That he stood calm and poised at the railing with a tight and knowing smile while watching the gathered fish feed on that discarded meat did even less.

We had first met in the service of King Furimmer and later, over the long years, become fast friends. Together we stood at the Battle of Sinnlos as the Seiger Clan’s Delusionist cracked and lost control of her inner demons. Captain Pizarr had been a handsome lieutenant and I, Gehirn Schlechtes, a promising young member of King Furimmer’s cadre of Pyrocasts. Somewhat unstable perhaps, but all the more valued for it.

Those days are ten years dead and gone. The Captain has changed. I have changed. Many nights I have stood hidden in the shadow of the fo’c’sle, fat and balding, watching my only friend feed the fish.

At night, when the crew thought the Captain asleep, I would listen to them speculate as to the condition of the Captain’s body. His uniform, a sun-faded blue bedecked with medals and honours, was stained in dark patches from something leaking within. Had the rot reached his torso? If not yet, what would happen when it did?

Times and people change and I had degenerated from lonely and depressed to unstable and useful, and found employment as King Furimmer’s Executioner. I used my growing power in his service and when I became truly dangerous he cast me aside. But not before demanding one last foul act from me. I was to spy on my only friend and, should he stray from Furimmer’s plans, carry out the King’s Justice. Furimmer asked this of me and there was no room for refusal. I suppose hoping for loyalty from a Sociocast had been foolish. I told Pizarr nothing of this and sour betrayal ate at my guts.

When Captain Pizarr had Reizung, the Ship’s Counsellor, thrown overboard, the crew had nearly mutinied. Seasoned sailors knew the danger of unwatched and unrestrained Maniacasts. A ship was too small and confined for those not in firm control of their reason. But that had been early in the voyage. Captain Pizarr had been dashing and persuasive and the Counsellor had been a prick. A good Ship’s Counsellor works alongside the crew and doesn’t rub in the fact that his only real task is preserving their sanity and keeping the Maniacasts in check. Reizung had wandered the deck, pompous and immaculate, complaining of boredom while the crew toiled at their tasks. No one had missed him. Until Captain Pizarr started to rot.

Instability, doubt, depression and fear. Such thoughts breed insanity. As the crew grew to fear both Pizarr and myself, they themselves began displaying Delusionist tendencies. Unschuldig of the Crow’s Watch Crew had always had a affinity for snakes, but when ill-tempered vipers appeared where there had been none Pizarr had ordered the young man drowned in a bucket. When things started to go missing the crew knew there was a budding Kleptocast on-board. If they couldn’t figure out who it was before he grew in strength, there’d be no stopping him.

***

Stoßinder Rückseite, the First Mate, approached me one evening. With his head bowed, he dared only quick glances at my face to gauge my reaction.

“The Captain is...” His gaze darted to meet mine and skittered away. “The crew fears he may die. They fear he may already be...” He stared at the stained deck and I watched him steel his nerve. “Dead.”

I waited until he looked up and showed him my over-large canines in a leer. I did not have to pretend to be dangerous and deranged. I was. As a cadre Pyrocast and King Furimmer’s Executioner I had earned a reputation. There wasn’t a man aboard, my only friend the Captain included, who wasn’t terrified of what I was capable of.

“If any man raises a hand against Captain Pizarr or disobeys a single order... I’ll reduce the entire ship to a sludge of floating ash.”

Rückseite deflated like sails in a flagging wind. He looked to be on the verge of tears and I wanted to comfort him. There was nothing within me that knew how. Where would I have learned such behaviour?

“Ash,” I whispered again and shivered. It had been too long and a ship was no place for a true conflagration. I remembered watching Ausfal burn at the Battle of Sinnlos. Rückseite fled the deck. I may have been grinning at the fond memory.

***

Pizarr’s self-hatred gnawed at his psyche, and though I could both understand and relate to his plight, I could not forgive. He had killed the Counsellor, the one man who could have saved us both.

The day we set sail from Grauchloss Harbour the Captain had joined me on the deck as I oversaw the final loading of the ship.

“Gehirn, my old friend,” he said, thumping me on the back, “death will be an escape from a lifetime of defeat.”

I was never sure if he meant this to be reassuring.

We had talked at great length many times over the years. Pizarr’s childhood had been a disappointment to his mother and his adulthood had been a disappointment to his father. Success was the last thing he wanted.

One morning over breakfast—a tasteless sludge of boiled meat and grey vegetable matter—Captain Pizarr joked that he had been secretly hoping the crew would dump him overboard in mutiny. Their cowardice and acceptance of his increasingly insane and dangerous behaviour only fed his depression.

“Men,” said Captain Pizarr, “are maggots. The wretched rot of the world.”

I watched as he pushed the food around on his plate and ate none of it. When had he stopped eating? After he left I devoured his breakfast as well as my own so that the cook would report to the men that the Captain was still eating. Afterward I patted the roundness of my sated belly and hated myself. My mother would never allow me to leave the table with food still on my plate, and I still can’t.

Can I blame her for what I have become?

When do you take responsibility for who you are?

***

Days slid past like the neverending morass of seaweed. I watched the good Captain feed the fish and the men watched me, wondering if they dared mutiny.

On the twentieth calmed day the ship drifted into a damp fog bank that smelled of mud and rotting fish. I could see neither the man in the crow’s nest nor, when I looked over the railing, the sea. A heavy miasma ate every sound, sucking each noise hungrily and swallowing it into murky bowels. Men had to scream themselves hoarse just to be heard on the far side of the deck. The superstitious claimed this was the work of an unhinged Delusionist hidden somewhere aboard. Older sailors bragged about how they’d seen worse.

Fearing that he might take this opportunity to feed the fish one final course, I went looking for the Captain. I found him standing at the bow coughing up rot-stained chunks flecked with dried blood and spitting them into the sea. He was first to hear the breaking surf and ran screaming orders to drop anchor and heave hard about. These sudden signs of life from our Captain gave the crew some brief hope. No one knew if the ravages of a Cotardist’s delusions could be reversed by something as simple as excitement, but anything was better than watching him pick himself apart.

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