Axis appeared then, standing on the table, leaning against the sorcerer’s whiskey glass. “Mission accomplished.”
Minus started at the sound of the rat’s voice. It took a moment to recover his composure. “Did you bite them all?”
“Every one,” said the rat. “Reality is backhanding them as we speak.”
“Were there any problems?” asked Minus.
“They set some cats on us. We killed and ate them and took their fur for our nests.”
“How was the weather…?”
“Forget the weather, I’ve got hungry troops to feed. The wheel of Gouda, please.”
“The wheel of Gouda is elsewhere,” said Minus.
“Where?”
“I ate it. I was trapped by the snow. Mug took all of our provisions. “
Axis shook his head and smiled, “Your strategy is weak, sorcerer, but you’ve still got a lot of meat on you. As I said, my troops are starving.” The rat nonchalantly gave the command and a furry wave of paws and teeth and tails rushed forward from the rafters to devour the flesh of Minus. The sorcerer, screaming, remained conscious through much of the repast and each bite was a sharp spell of agony.
The eyes were reserved for Axis, and he had them served with mustard when the day was done. Their jellied reflection told him that Minus could have used enchantment to save himself but chose not to. “Fool,” said the rat. He bit down on the first eye and dust exploded into his mouth. “They didn’t call him Minus for nothing,” he said, spitting into the puddle of mustard and wiping his snout. The second eye, when bitten, gushed the drop of self-delusion and tasted sweet as a pineapple candy.
Years passed and the hunting lodge was forgotten by whoever had owned it. The picked-clean skeleton of Minus sat in its chair before the fireplace. On the day ten years later when Bill Mug finally captured the spirit of Night and Day and minutes later willingly released it before blowing his brains out, the sorcerer’s jawbone fell off into his lap. On the evening when Axis was devoured by a swarm of locusts during the Battle of the Great Plains in the Insect/Rodent Wars, the rotted front chair legs gave out and dumped Minus’s skeleton in a jumble on the floor before the fireplace. The mohair cardigan was eaten, over a decade of summer evenings, by white moths. Weeds grew up through what remained of the planks and sprouted from the skull’s left eye socket. The roof collapsed, the rains came, the drifts of snow and weeds again.
Everyone who remembered the sorcerer Minus eventually died. His bones were pulverized to dust by the tread of Time. It’s hard now to remember if he ever really existed or was merely some spell of enchantment, perhaps the dream of a space traveler asleep in a cryogenic cocoon. Or something far less: an act of subtraction, diminishing into the future.
Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of the novels The Prodigal Troll, The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. Finlay’s short fiction — most of which appears in his collection, Wild Things—has been published in several magazines, such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Black Gate, and in anthologies, such as The Best of All Flesh and my own By Blood We Live and The Living Dead 2. He has twice been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards, and has also been nominated for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sidewise Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
This next story draws us into Colonial America, a time and place where piracy ruled — even in the provincial government. After all, it’s a well-known fact that most flamboyant of American forefathers, John Hancock, made his fortune as a privateer.
When Proctor Brown and Deborah Walcott, two young Quaker witches, set out on a mission for General Washington, they expect to use their powers to catch a spy, not a pirate. But when magic goes awry, the pair find themselves pulled into a pocket world of oceans, islands, and never-ending night. In this alternate corner of reality, nothing is as it seems, and while they have found their quarry, he proves just as enigmatic as the strange world they’ve entered. Is he another victim of this place’s magic, or a magician himself? And how can Proctor and Deborah discover a way out of a land that just might be… hell?
In this tale, C.C. Finlay gives us new piece of his Traitor to the Crown milieu. It’s magic on the high seas — in a realm as dark as a pirate’s heart.
Life So Dear or Peace So Sweet
C.C. Finlay
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”
The Thimble Islands
off the coast of Connecticut
May, 1776
“I don’t know how we’re supposed to see anything in this mist,” Proctor Brown said in the bow of the boat. The little one-sail wherry bobbed like a cork in a milky morning fog that obscured everything around them, including the British spy ship they were seeking.
“If you shout a little louder, maybe they’ll hear you and call out where they are,” Deborah Walcott answered quietly behind him.
Proctor bit his tongue on a reply. The implication to be quiet was a good one, especially since other searchers had gone missing when they chased the mysterious spy ship.
Deborah’s sharp wit was one of the things that he simultaneously loved and found deeply frustrating. The other was not knowing where he stood with her. The murder of her parents before the Battle of Bunker Hill had complicated things between them, and the friends of her mother who had appointed themselves guardians and chaperones did their best to keep Proctor and Deborah apart.
The tone of her voice had made it hard to tell if she was amused at him or angry, so he turned to read the clues in her face. It didn’t help. Even though only a few feet away in the middle of the boat, she was little more than a gray shadow.
“Eyes forw’d, eh,” said the third passenger from the rear of the boat — a weathered privateer named Esek O’Brian. Like Proctor and Deborah, he’d been personally selected by General George Washington for this mission, though the three of them hadn’t met until Esek picked up Deborah and Proctor on a beach this morning. He was built like an iron anvil, equally suited to shape good purposes as ill, and had been a privateer and smuggler in these waters for thirty years. But all sorts of men had joined the Revolution, so Proctor hesitated to judge him.
“Eyes forward,” Proctor answered. He leaned over the gunwale to watch for the dangerous rocks that lurked just beneath the slate-colored waves.
A British warship had been seen several times lurking among the rocky Thimble Islands just off the coast of Connecticut. There was concern that the British were landing spies there, maybe even preparing to land troops. The American colonies had still not officially declared their independence from England and a dramatic victory by the British could bring it all to end.
The colonies had sent several fishing boats and sloops out to find the elusive ship, but four of them had disappeared now without a trace. There were no sounds of battle, no signs of wreckage. People whispered that it was like magic, that even the fog was unnatural. Diverting more and larger ships to search would leave other parts of the coast unprotected.