“I…I will have to consider that….” The Elder retracted all its tentacles and humanoid features. The twins were facing a massive, featureless, stone obelisk.
“What’s to think about? You leave our books alone or your book is a goner!” Thyme shouted.
“Dead, splat…ash,” added Iris.
An eye and a speaking tube appeared. “I could kill you, or keep you here—turn you into ice statues.”
“You could, but you won’t,” said Iris.
“Why is that, pray tell? Please enlighten me.”
“Because our colleagues know we were looking for the source of the books’ distress. If we don’t return, they will initiate a meticulous search of the stacks.” Iris was lying baldly, hoping the monster wouldn’t guess.
“They’d find your eye into our world,” added Thyme, smiling.
“Humphf!” grunted the Elder. “We seem to have reached something of an impasse.”
“I would say so.”
“Let me see if I understand this correctly: If I don’t stop altering the books in your library, you will destroy the foundation document of my world, left for safe-keeping—and in good faith—in your TGB.”
“That sums it up,” said Thyme. “And all the other copies.”
“If I promise to leave your books alone and return you safely to your blasted library, you promise to leave my books alone?”
“Done,” said both.
“ Do you promise never to come to my world again?”
“Definitely! I’d offer to shake on it, but I might vomit all over you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” The Elder produced a high-pitched humming sound that continued for several seconds, bringing a phalanx of gangly mantis creatures at a gallop. “See that these two are delivered intact back to the portal from which they entered.’”
High, fluting voices responded. “Yes, Your Evilness! Nothing will happen to these ugly creatures while we clean them out of our home.”
“Good. Now get them out of here.”
The Mantis Guard, forming a tight square around Iris and Thyme, marched forward. There was no escape and nothing to be done but move with them. After about ten metres, the ground under their feet disappeared. They were flying upwards though what seemed to be a giant wormhole. As on the downward journey, time ceased to register until they were propelled through a membrane in the tunnel. Pop!—and they were back in the library.
“Ow, that was weird,” said Iris. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“What time is it?”
Thyme looked at her watch, which had started working again, “It reads 22:00 hours. Can that be right? We’re back before we left?”
“Let’s go to the front desk and check.”
As the twins walked through the tunnels of stacks towards the reception area, a soft, melodious humming began. “Iris, what’s that?”
“I think the books are thanking us.”
“Oh, how lovely.”
In the cavernous, marble reception area, everything looked just as it always did. The brass clock above the main desk read 22:15. “Look at that,” “said Thyme. “It felt like we’d been gone for hundreds of years.”
“But it was less than nothing…minus an hour. Weird.”
“Seems so. I don’t care right now. Let’s go home.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Didn’t change them, though—did I?”
The twins went through the routines for securing the building; recalibrating and turning on the sensors, checking that all peripheral doors were closed and locked; setting the alarms; and, finally, locking the main entrance doors with their bronze bas-reliefs. Someone else could open them tomorrow. They were going to call in sick. They’d earned it.
Just as the heavy doors were clicking shut—way, way back at the end of the oldest, dustiest stack—a black eye opened and closed; a tiny violet light winked on and then out.
GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BYAKHEE
By Molly Tanzer
Molly Tanzer is the Managing Editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine. Her debut book, A Pretty Mouth, is forthcoming from Lazy Fascist Press in late 2012. Her fiction has appeared in Running with the Pack, Historical Lovecraft, Lacuna, The Book of Cthulhu, and other places, and is forthcoming in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She is an out-of-practice translator of ancient Greek, an infrequent blogger, and an avid admirer of the novels of eighteenth century England. Currently, she resides in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. You can find her at http://mollytanzer.com. More frequently she tweets over at @molly_the_tanz.
…human kind
cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
WRIGGLER LIVED IN the lake, and when you didn’t throw stones at him too much, he would bring up purple-scaled balık and tiny scuttling yengeç for roasty crunchings. Feathers lived in a hut in the treetops and she would help pick the highest-up kayısı when they were ripe and juicy—sometimes. Feathers was mean. Half the time, if you so much as looked at her funny, she would open her mouth wide like an O and birdy squawks would come out, eee eee eee, which, true, were the only words she ever said since she changed, but she could make them sound so angry! No one cared if she was angry, though, because even with the wings, she couldn’t fly. Wriggler could breathe underwater, and Whee! could swing from branch to branch with his long fuzzy tail, and Mister Pinch could bruise you with the handy claw on his extra arm, if he ever got mad at you. Ouch! Feathers, she looked like a birdy, but wasn’t, quite. Everybody said it was because she didn’t pray hard enough when she went on pilgrimage to Tuz Gölü, to see the Mother in the Salt.
Dicle was still a two-legs, two-hands, two-eyes, upright skin-wearer, so she still had her cradle-name that said nothing at all about who she really was. Bo-ring! But that would change soon, she knew it. When she went to fetch water, she could see, in the shiny surface of the well, two of the protuberances mammals and mostly-mammals got when they were ready to give live birth and suckle their young, and she’d had a dream about Wriggler coming to the surface and touching her between the legs with one of his long, bendy arms. Those were the signs, Whee! had said, but then again, Whee! couldn’t be trusted, not completely. Whee! wanted to be the one Dicle took as a snuggler, once she was given her true shape by the Mother in the Salt. But Dicle knew she’d rather snuggle with Wriggler, even if they had to do it mostly underwater, so he could huff and puff through his gills.
But Stag-Face said Dicle wasn’t ready for pilgrimage, or for huff-and-puff. Stag-Face said she was still a baby-girl and, since Stag-Face was the boss of everybody—those who’d visited the Mother in the Salt, those who hadn’t yet, and especially those who failed—she had to heed him. She hated it, though! Ugh! Kids like her, they couldn’t dance in the nightly revels, and they had to do all the worst chores, like climbing up the burning rocks to every single one of the hill-caves to dump out the piss-pots, or sweeping away the rubble to find the empty meat-shells when the earth shook and there were cave-ins, or weave reeds into wind-shields so people could sleep out of the dusty, gusting breezes. But Dicle didn’t like climbing, and she didn’t like to clear away rocks to find meat-shells, and she didn’t like weaving, either. She liked to run as fast as she could and she could run so fast! Stag-Face said maybe she could be a messenger, once she was old enough. But she was old enough and that was why she’d come up with the secret plan.