Archive for June, 2013

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 266, Giant Episode: The House of Aunts

Originally appeared in Giganotosaurus on December 1, 2011. Read the text there.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:10 — 66.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Show Notes

Rated R for vampires, and their extended families.

The House of Aunts

by Zen Cho

To the women of my family.

The house stood back from the road in an orchard. In the orchard, monitor lizards the length of a man’s arm stalked the branches of rambutan trees like tigers on the hunt. Behind the house was an abandoned rubber tree plantation, so proliferant with monkeys and leeches and spirits that it might as well have been a forest.

Inside the house lived the dead.

The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue. That was what happened–no poetry about it. She looked at a human boy one day and the creamy rank richness of durian filled her mouth. For a moment the ghost of its stench staggered on the edge of her teeth, and then it vanished.

She had not tasted fruit since before the baby came. Since before she was dead.

After school she went home and asked the aunts about it.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 265: The Copperroof War

Originally published in Ideomancer (Read it here!)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:46 — 34.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Show Notes

Rated R: Contains violence and an anthropomorphic house.

The Copperroof War

by Megan Arkenberg

It began in the south wing, near the long cold Hall of Empires and the chambers of the Duke of Cloud. Helene, the Duchess, woke at midnight to the metal sound of marching in the corridor, and farther away, the hollow ring of drums.

“Paride,” she whispered, shaking her husband’s shoulder. The cold was bitter, even in the Duke’s bedchamber, and her breath froze in a puff of white. The distant marching became louder, and she reached for the dagger on her bedside table.

Before Paride had fully awakened, the Duchess was flinging a silk dressing gown around her and fumbling for a candle. The fire had died — strangely, as the maids of Copperroof were known for their diligence — but the air smelled faintly of smoke.

“Ghosts,” the Duke murmured, pulling on a pair of trousers. “But I’ll be damned if they burn down Copperroof in the King’s absence.”

“Ghosts never enter the south wing,” Helene said. She climbed up on the chair by her writing desk and took two trophies from the wall: an ancient Imixian saber, curved and wickedly sharp, and a bastard sword from the brief reign of Socorro XI. She handed the saber to her husband and led the way — candle and dagger in one hand, sword in the other — into the smoke-choked corridor.

PodCastle logo

PodCastle Episode 264: Mermaid’s Hook

Originally published in Apex Magazine. Read the story here!

Rated R: Contains disturbing imagery.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:21 — 22.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Mermaid’s Hook

by Liz Argall

She caught treasures from the ship with her sisters; dangerous, exotic objects that plummeted through the water. Metal not yet rusted; fractured glass and timbers not yet smoothed by the sea; woven filaments as delicate as jellyfish, and as treacherous. Curiosities from the world above to be dared, caught, examined and discarded.

She found him falling. He fell fast, tangled in chains, his shirt billowing up around him, shedding bubbles in all directions as his body tore through the water. She surged towards him, caught him in her arms, then paused. Here was no special prize. Normally, they would let humans sink to the bottom and serve as bait for delicious crabs and tastier morsels, but this one still struggled. His urgent desire to live evoking something almost forgotten; an electric hum on the back of her tongue of land-life never known, but bone-remembered. She hummed low and chirruped in surprise, “Who are you? Why are you in my arms?”

He spasmed for a moment, his convulsions almost knocking him out of her grasp, the whites of his eyes flickering through half opened slits.

Her sisters hummed, “Why are you playing with the land-thing? Wait for the crabs to come.”

“I think it’s alive.”

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 263: Beyond the Shrinking World

Originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue #102, August 23, 2012. Read the text there.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:28 — 38.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Show Notes

Rated R for violence.

Read by Dominick Rabrun, of Dom’s Sketch Cast. Check out the video for this week’s episode here!

Beyond the Shrinking World

by Nathaniel Katz

“Bring my prisoner,” I said and none dared question, not a knight and Scholar-Practitioner so august as I. They knew the glyph carved into the base of my tongue kept me from lying.

The guards brought the being that called himself Jani in his stolen flesh. Cuts ran down his flank, long and precise, a still-living carcass torn open reach at it soul. In his eyes, spirit blues cavorted round stuck-wide pupils. I can take you Outside, he’d said, at our first meeting. Can bring you to the Mapmaker. At the time, I’d responded with drawn sword and assault, my Out-blade slipping through his dark flesh but halting at the spirit, parasitic, within. His legs bore testament to those wounds; shallow but immeasurable.

“Dress him,” I said. “We need to be on our way.”

The Lord hesitated, and procedure won out. “I’ll need to see papers, Sir Rollus,” he said.

Make it bloody, the Lady Clarissa, ruler of this world and all men in it, had told me. Leave no doubts.