Just wanted to let everyone know that The Alphabet Quartetis coming, but it looks like it’s going to be coming a little bit later than we’d originally hoped, and it won’t be sent to you in time for the holiday.
I am sincerely sorry for the delay – we’d hoped to get it to you by the weekend. That said, I’ve put a lot of time into it, as has Wilson Fowlie (who is working as the sound producer), and we don’t want to give something unless we’re completely happy with it.
As I said, it is coming, and it should be coming soon. I’ll definitely keep you all updated as to when you can expect it.
Thanks for your patience. I’m looking forward to sharing all these stories with you.
Since the ascension of the young dukes, the landholders no longer carry swords, and we are no longer obliged to kneel in their presence. Taxes have been lowered; we can keep more of our grain, our olives, our limes. Obligatory civic work days have been decreased to five per month. Smile, the elders say. Raise up your heads. The sun has emerged after long, long years of rain.
Raise up your heads. That is the way they speak, on warm nights when work is over, and dinner has been plentiful, and a wineskin is moving from hand to hand. They laugh, and boast, so proud of themselves for having survived to old age. But let a landholder walk through the square, or ride to the fields to inspect the crops, or make an appearance at a wedding or a festival, jovial and swordless, and the elders duck their heads and mumble, the same as the rest of us.
You see? the Younger Son-in-Law says. They themselves do not believe that all is well.
She went to the idol-shop in Moleshill Street, where the old man mumbles, and said: “I want a god to worship when it is wet.”
The old man reminded her of the heavy penalties that rightly attach to idolatry and, when he had enumerated all, she answered him as was meet: “Give me a god to worship when it is wet.”
Originally Published in Fantasy Fan. Read the story here!
Across the red drifts and mail-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white illimitable plain around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as ghosts might come to a tryst through the shambles of a dead world. In the brooding silence they stood face to face.
Both were tall men, built like tigers. Their shields were gone, their corselets battered and dinted. Blood dried on their mail; their swords were stained red. Their horned helmets showed the marks of fierce strokes. One was beardless and black maned. The locks and beard of the other were red as the blood on the sunlit snow.
“Man,” said he, “tell me your name, so that my brothers in Vanaheim may know who was the last of Wulfhere’s band to fall before the sword of Heimdul.”
“Not in Vanaheim,” growled the black-haired warrior, “but in Valhalla will you tell your brothers that you met Conan of Cimmeria.”
She moved outside, making her way through the yard, blades of wet grass poking at her bare ankles. The air smelled sweet, almost musty. It was early October, cold and breezy, and the night sky was clear. Mrs. Peña could just make out the rough silhouettes of her neighbors as they stood at their windows and in their front lawns, holding candles, watching, waiting. She overheard bits and pieces of their conversations:
“Phones aren’t working.”
“Cars aren’t running.”
“Radios and flashlights won’t even turn on.”
“No electricity anywhere in town.”
“There’s something in the park.”
The park.
Mrs. Peña hurried across the street. As she entered the park, the ground dipped before her and she tripped. She tried to catch herself, but instead she fell against a wall — a moist wall of flesh.
by Ben Burgis.
Read by Eric Luke (of the Extruding America podcast).
Originally appeared in GigaNotoSaurus. The full text is available.
The Tsar abdicates in February. The Provisional Government gets around to letting Fyodor out of prison in March. In April, he meets his Uncle Grigor at a Petrograd cafe. They talk about magic, death and revolution.
“I don’t care, Fyodka. Romans or Visagoths, Christians or Mohammedans, Tsars or…” The old man waves his hand, making a show of remembering the word. “…Bolsheviks… They’re all just different acts in the same circus.”
Fyodor and Grigor sit at a table by the window. They drink their tea in the Ukranian style, with apple slices.
Most of Grigor’s little sermon is familiar from the letters they exchanged while Fyodor was in prison, but one line rankles. “Politics change. What we do doesn’t. You should remember that.”
Fyodor wants very badly to correct that ‘we,’ to tell his uncle that there’s a reason he hasn’t so much as looked at his magic books since he was fourteen years of age. Instead, he blows on his tea and watches the steam rise up and disappear. When he does speak, his voice is subdued.
“In ancient Rome, who did the work?”
Grigor favors him with a sad, indulgent look. It’s exactly the way he always looked at Fyodor back home in the Ukraine, when they spent long winter afternoons playing chess. The look says, ‘I see why you’re moving your bishop like that, and I wish you wouldn’t, but I suppose this is the only way you’ll ever learn.’
“N is for Nevermore Nevermore Land,” read by Mur Lafferty (the Mighty, MIGHTY)
Be sure and check out Escape Pod and Pseudopod for other free Alphabet Quartet stories. While your at it, visit Daily Science Fiction, where you can read the all the original Alphabet Quartet stories, and get free SF/F stories delivered to your email, um, daily.
