“You’ll have to take that up with Mister, my lord.”
The big cat, sprawled in my lord’s lap, purred contentedly. He apparently had no regrets about leaving none alive to tell tales.
“My lord?” I said after a quiet moment.
Those sad, dark eyes looked down at me. “Yeah, General?”
“I am sorry,” I said. “That your heart hurts. She was brave.”
He stopped chewing pizza and stared down at me for a long moment. Then he blinked several times and said, “Yes, she was. Thank you, Toot.”
I patted his knee awkwardly. He rested a couple of fingertips on my shoulder for a moment in response.
“You did great tonight,” he said. “Bob says the Castle’s defenses were all calibrated to larger threats. He didn’t have them set to see anything as small and sneaky as gremlins. Without you and the Guard, the place might have burned down. People under my protection could have gotten hurt.”
I felt my chest stick out a little more. “It was nothing, my lord. All in a night’s work.” I paused, and said abashedly, “I am sorry about your refrigerator, my lord.”
“Necessary action. I try never to second-guess the guy on the ground.” He took an entire piece of pizza and offered it to me.
I accepted it gravely.
“My lord,” I said. “This battle is done. But what will we do about the conomee?”
He took another piece of pizza of his own and held it forth. We gravely tapped pizza, and then ate. “What we always do, little buddy,” he said. “We stick together.”
I sat down next to him. A moment later, Lacuna came to sit beside me. I gave her half of my pizza.
“You came for me first,” she said. “Not the pizza.”
“You,” I said, “are more important than pizza.”
She stared at me in fond, stony silence for a moment before she said, “You are a great fool.”
But she leaned against me while she ate.
THE DARK SHIP
by Anne Bishop
Last night I dreamed about the dark ship.
People say it’s bad luck to be on the water when the full moon rises, because that’s when the dark ship goes hunting, its tattered black sails catching a fast wind that touches no other ship. People say it is crewed by monstrous beings that capture hardworking fishermen and honest sailors, and its captain drinks the captives’ blood before giving the bodies to his crew, who devour the flesh and suck the marrow from the bones.
People say that if your vessel is suddenly becalmed and a fog rolls in without warning, look to the horizon, and if you see those black sails silhouetted against the moon, it is better to die by your own hand than to wait for the monsters to find you. Because they will find you. They always find you.
I lived in Pyetra, a small fishing village on the coast of the Mediterran Sea. According to the grandmothers, it had been aprosperous village, and while the buildings near the water had been built out of the gray stone that had given Pyetra its name, the homes of the more affluent residents had been painted in soft pastels—yellow, rose, green, blue—so that, from the water, the village had looked like a bouquet of flowers set against the hills.
Then the Humans First and Last movement declared war on theterra indigene, and the Cel-Romano Alliance of Nations was torn apart by the Others’ fury and power over the world. Instead of an alliance, nations were separated by veins of wild country, and anything human who stumbled into that land never came out.
Small villages like mine were untouched for the most part because the men who fished in the Mediterran or sailed that water to carry goods from one city to another—or sailed beyond our waters to trade—knew that the sea belonged to theterra indigene, and crews that were careful, and respectful, never saw the lethal terror that watched them but let them pass, and those were the men who returned home.
In a world torn apart by war, the vulnerable often fell victim to predators who waited for such opportunities to crack people’s sense of right and wrong, using fear as a hammer.
In the end, it wasn’t the Others who ruined Pyetra. It was a man called Captain Starr.
I sense things about ships and the sea. I can’t see the future like those prophet girls we’d heard about, but when I walk along the shore and watch the fishing boats heading out for the day, sometimes I know which boats will have a good catch and which ones will come back with an empty hold. Sometimes I can tell when the sea will be unforgiving and it’s better not to stray too far from the harbor. I don’t tell anyone what I know, except one or two ofthe canny old grandfathers, and even with them, I am careful. I was a child when it happened, but I remember the last woman in our village who had a feeling about the weather and the sea. She was publicly beaten to death for “ill wishing” because she had warned a captain of a storm on a day when the sea was calm and the sky was clear, and he ignored her. When the storm appeared like screaming fury, she was blamed for the loss of that ship and crew.
I sense things about ships and the sea. It was my misfortune that I had never been able to sense danger to myself.
