Western Chow Mein Red Dawn

by Lavie Tidhar

The strangers came under a red half-moon to Three Blind Sisters. They wore strange clothes – stiff-looking black and tan suits of foreign design, with black hats and carefully-manicured beards. On their belts they carried guns. All but their leader, who dressed casually and carried no weapons, and who had an easy smile.

‘He is so handsome,’ the boy’s sister said. They were watching the men ride past the three Blind Sisters who gave the village its name. The stone statues, ancient guardians of this small, distant place, stared at the men without seeing. Their power had weakened over generations: now they were little more than mute stone, and no one in the village could remember them ever speaking.

The boy felt a tingling at the tip of his fingers. He saw with his inner eye: the leader rode unarmed because his power was great. The aura of Qi around him was unmistakable. Unease made him close his fingers into a fist. The man, passing close to them, glanced casually their way: his eyes locked on the boy’s for one long, uncomfortable moment. Then his gaze shifted to the boy’s sister, and the smile flared up like a small sun.

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.

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.”

The Dragonslayer of Merebarton

by K.J. Parker

On reflection, if I hadn’t seen those wretched White Drakes in Outremer, there’s a reasonable chance I’d have refused to believe in a dragon trashing Merebarton, and then, who knows, it might’ve flown away and bothered someone else. Well, you don’t know, that’s the whole point. It’s that very ignorance that makes life possible. But when Ebba told me what the boy told him he’d seen, immediately I thought; White Drake. Clearly it wasn’t one, but it was close enough to something I’d seen to allow belief to seep into my mind, and then I was done for. No hope.

Even so, I think I said, “Are you sure?” about six or seven times, until eventually it dawned on me I was making a fool of myself. At which point, a horrible sort of mist of despair settled over me, as I realised that this extraordinary, impossible, grossly and viciously unfair thing had landed on me, and that I was going to have to deal with it.

But you do your best. You struggle, just as a man crushed under a giant stone still draws in the last one or two desperate whistling breaths; pointless, but you can’t just give up. So I looked him steadily in the eye, and I said, “So, what do they expect me to do about it?”

The Discriminating Monster’s Guide to the Perils of Princess Snatching

by Scott M. Roberts

I let her see my fangs.

The princess dropped the box-cutter.  She had just cut herself—shallow slashes that cried tiny, scarlet pearls.  Her blood smelled as sweet as cotton candy, but it was the scent of her destiny that had led me to her.  Spicy and cloying, the princess’s destiny made my mouth water, set an itch and tingle in my skin.  I inhaled it and let the city, with its bloated trash bags and filthy humans and miles of steaming asphalt, fade, fade, fade into the darkness.  The princess’s destiny was like Christmas morning: cloves and oranges, nutmeg explosions and cinnamon arias.  All bright; all clean.  A song in my sinuses, on the back of my throat, as pure as a child’s kiss, as sweet cream.

I bumped my nose against the window.  The twinge of pain brought me back to reality.  The city, the humans, the asphalt, all that.  And more, now: the stench of the princess’s mother downstairs, sucking on vodka and painkillers, stinking of booze and vomit.

The window wasn’t locked; I rubbed my nose with one hand and opened it with the other. “Hello, princess,” I said.