Page 43 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

Crossing over The Thralls into the Giantlands beyond Manreach would be deadly even in fair weather, and our pair are attempting it as the world turns towards winter. Strange beasties, bandits and baleful weather all bring Kinch and Galva closer to ruin in The Thrice-Bound Fool; not to mention a magical, sentient, and murderous book trying to escape by any means necessary. Talk about a lack of scruples.

“Better a thrice-bound thief than a fool who thinks he’s free.”

As we get deeper into the story, they struggle with tortured souls, aggressive owl-beasts, slavers, half-giants, giants and gods with absolutely zero chill. We see Galva befriending a tiger and fighting as a gladiator; Kinch grappling with the murder alphabet and playing fool for a princess; as well as goblins, explosions, skyships and a particularly curious cuttlefish.

Throughout The Thrice-Bound Fool, there are key themes of loyalty, dedication, and love, and Buehlman has pitted these against the darker aspects of desperation, tragedy and death to great effect. Kinch is a happy-go-lucky scamp with the gift of the gab, pledged to a flighty god of mischief who might help you out should your plight cause him to crack a smile. The Thrice-Bound Fool puts Kinch and his beliefs through the ringer; both those about himself and the world around him.

There’s something special about Kinch and his storyteller’s voice that sings in this series. For weeks after I finished the book, I was having to resist inserting little Kinchisms into my everyday speech. The juxtaposition between his fervently unserious demeanour and the harrowing events he recounts makes The Thrice-Bound Fool a memorable read.

While I’ve talked about how this tale changes Kinch: don’t think Galva gets out of it unscathed. Where we perhaps see Kinch hardening, we see Galva softening, if only a smidge. She’d never admit it, of course. The two are pulled apart and drawn closer together repeatedly in The Thrice-Bound Fool; pushed to the point where they truly have nothing left to lose.

The tone in The Thrice-Bound Fool, much like in The Blacktongue Thief, may not suit everyone. As I’ve said, Kinch is our narrator and he can be a jesterly sort, even as the world burns down around him. It’s a different tactic to telling a darker story that I find refreshing and charming. The themes and content within should satiate those with a penchant for the grim, and Buehlman will sneakily make you ponder some deep topics while he’s entertaining you with this bards’ tale of a journey.

Futurephage

By Laurel Hightower

Isla made her way through the waiting room of expectant mothers, avoiding eye contact and ignoring the stir of activity her appearance sent rippling through the crowd. With the mood in the room, any change, any breath of forward momentum, and all the doomed parents reacted to the surge of adrenaline spiking their hearts and anxiety. Whispers and gazes followed her until she scanned her badge and ducked through the door leading deeper into the lab, where curtains had been hung to create a semblance of privacy for the thousands who’d passed through her hands already, and the hundreds who still awaited her ministrations. The collection phase of the project was winding down, though millions still languished on waiting lists—there simply wasn’t enough time to fulfill everyone’s wish of a bright future. Other countries might have similar programs, but she hadn’t heard about them. For all she knew, she was the only specialist of her kind. And she was only one person, no matter how dedicated and capable, and the powers that be had waited far too long to start this phase. She’d always known they would.

“Morning, Dr. Marsh. Got a full schedule today.”

Lana moved through the lab, flipping on lights, checking that each of the twenty bays were equipped and ready for patients, sighing and flapping the hem of her scrub top. Their facility was one of the few remaining in the country with free reign of power usage, save those owned by the uber rich that remained. They were even allowed air conditioning, a luxury that made Isla’s skin crawl with guilt, at the same time she sank into the only relief she got from temperatures that hadn’t dipped below one hundred Fahrenheit in the last two years. Maybe that was the real reason people flocked to MotherTech and didn’t mind the wait.

Isla scrubbed up and listened with half an ear to Lana’s flat recitation of the latest death tolls. Heat-related deaths topped the charts the world over, but flooding and fires were a close second and third. She didn’t know why Lana tortured herself—at this point, the end game was inevitable, so why not preserve what little peace any of them had? But Lana, her nurse from back when she’d worked nights at the Little Hope fertility clinic, would only say that she would not choose to look away.

“Maybe it doesn’t do ‘em any good, but I’m still human. I’m still in here, no matter what’s coming down the line.”

Isla didn’t answer that they knew damn well what was coming down the line for all of them. It wouldn’t have been fair, since Dr. Isla Marsh wouldn’t be sharing the fate of most of humanity. Lana knew it, though neither she nor any of the other staff ever mentioned it. Only once, when news of Isla’s new position came down the line, with the related perk of a seat on the last bus off Earth, had the matter been mentioned between the women.

Lana’s dark eyes shone with unshed tears as she touched Isla’s shoulder. “I’m glad it’s you, Doc. You’re our hope for the future, and knowing you’ll be up there, watching over all those little ones...it makes the rest of it bearable. If you’re going on, and taking our future with you, then I can live with that.” Her smile had been tremulous, but genuine. “We’re all counting on you, Isla.”

Isla felt the weight of that hope every waking moment. It was the same sentiment uttered by most of her patients as she relieved them of their most precious cargo with as much delicacy as she could garner. The same sentiment, in fact, she’d heard her entire life, as long as she could remember. The children are our future. The children will save us. The kids are all right.

The kids had been anything but all right. Born into the last generation who would make it to adulthood, all the bright-eyed hope for a better world, the magic of believing a future awaited her, had been stripped at a criminally young age. Isla knew some kids whose parents had protected them from the truth as long as possible, asking useless questions like what did little Jackson want to be when he grew up? How many children did Anna want one day? As though there was the slightest chance for any of them. The clock struck midnight long before they reached their eighteenth birthdays, and she always wondered which option was worse—having your hope robbed before you could read your first chapter book, or being fed a lie and having it all come crashing down when your parents could no longer hide the pendulum swinging ever lower over humanity.

Isla’s choice was made for her by her father, an engineer who didn’t believe in sugar coating things for his six year old daughter. He didn’t believe in comfort of any kind and hadn’t bothered cushioning the blow. He made her watch the news with him every night over her mother’s objections, and that was how Isla learned she had no hope of making it much past the age of thirty. He hadn’t even told her himself, had instead let her piece together the truth of her impending doom night by night, story after story. When she’d asked him once, big eyes brimming with unshed tears, whether anyone could save them, he’d only laughed.

“Why would anyone bother? It’d take the kind of sacrifice no one’s willing to make, Isla-bug.” He’d reached out and ruffled her hair while the bottom fell out of her stomach, her chest closing up as she faced the knowledge with her first-grader brain, that the future of the human race was a fiery ball of death, well within her lifetime.

Her chin trembling, she’d looked up at him. “I would. I would bother, even if it cost everything.”

He’d laughed harder. “And the second you were gone, the next person in your chair would happily push the red button and screw humanity, if it saved their precious skin.”

She’d cried herself to sleep that night, and for many nights after. Grieving a future she would never have, but it was so much larger than that, a concept her child’s mind struggled to grasp: a blank wall, a black hole where humanity had been. Even at six, she believed she could face her own death with equanimity, but not the end of everything. That was simply too large, and the pain of it, the impossibility mixed with the rock-bottom, dull agony of certainty, scarred her young mind forever.

Later on, as her peers faced their own revelations and dark nights of the soul, she could find it in herself to be grateful that she’d already done her grieving. It allowed her to focus, to plan, and brought her here, to this place, this moment, and this task. It was what she’d been meant to do, from the moment she’d known what she was facing. While other kids spiraled out, went down the routes of drug and alcohol abuse unchecked by parents who knew how useless interventions would be, Isla doubled down on her studies. She isolated herself from her peers, many of whom barely bothered to come to class as the planet’s demise accelerated. She couldn’t blame them, but they seemed to blame her for her commitment to her schooling. She could have told them her plans, her reasons, told them her work was for all their sakes. It wouldn’t have mattered—they needed someone to focus their ire on, a release valve for a grief too big to face. So she withdrew, avoided people wherever possible, and reflected that perhaps there had been truth to what her father had said all those years ago. Who in their right mind would sacrifice to save the future, when this was all the thanks they got?

These reflections didn’t deter her. There’s something about a plan set in stone at an early age, an unbreakable vow to one’s childhood self. Isla succeeded because she’d found that most elusive of assets: purpose in a world in free fall. She’d been able to see with clear eyes how everything would go down, even predicted with solemn certainty the massive failures of those first oversized escape ships. She’d stayed silent through the agonizing lotteries, the outrage when hundreds of the limited spots for survival were purchased by the same greedy bastards who’d ruined the world in the first place. She’d stayed up late to watch the launches, heard the quaver in the newscasters’ voices as they watched their only hope of survival recede into the fiery sky.

She’d listened, too, with the rest of the world, to the screams of those onboard, once thought so lucky, as they succumbed to fire, radiation leaks, starvation, and madness. And while she’d mourned right along with everyone else, there was a grim satisfaction in finding herself perfectly placed for the next phase she’d known must come. With dual concentrations in medicine and aerospace, in a minuscule field of applicants, she was a shoo-in for placement in NASA’s brand-new position of Future Biologist.

“Doc? Margot has the first three patients set up and ready to go.”

Isla nodded, straightened her white coat, and wrenched herself into the appropriate head space. She needed to give the necessary impression, even if only to selfishly prevent the kinds of emotional breakdowns that were only natural when parents are forced to give up a beloved child. So she schooled her expression into a sort of melancholy calm, and went to her first procedure of the day.

***

“…and, there we go. All safe and sound.” Isla maneuvered the twelve-week old fetus into its cryo-dish, freezing it in time with a few practiced moves. The process she’d developed was quick, minimally invasive to the uterus owner, and boasted an unmatched viability rate in frozen embryos and fetuses up to twenty-four weeks.