Five Bullets on the Banks of the Sadji

by Keffy R.M. Kehrli

My city is at the fork of two rivers, where the Sadji, river of my people, flows into the Koretl, a river that brings the rest of the world to us, brings empire to us, brings new spices and fabrics and magics to us, and flows away with our old selves, shed like snakeskin on the banks.

Sadji water runs thick with silt; it is the same red-brown as clay and the four unripe cocoa beans that my younger brother, Naje, brought to us from the north. Naje is dead now, dead of five bullets, one for each of the Northern Houses, the past-due payment earned by traitors.

The Koretl is a deep and sodden green, the color of glaciers tempered by the additions of a hundred southern rivers, each devoured by the hungry waters until they run as one. My older brother, Esha, said the color of it was more beautiful than the Sadji. He is also dead now, having caught a fever from the sick men he tended.

And now I am the last surviving brother, too violent to heal and too soft to fight, fishing from Sadji’s waters with my hands gone calloused from the nets.

A Hunter in Arin-Qin

by Daniel Abraham

At first, when the lights of my home still glimmered in the darkness behind me, the cold only chilled. Then, pressing through the snow with the effort of the chase keeping me warm, the cold bit.

At the end, it comforted.

It meant the worst kind of danger, but with fear itself a distant thing, even danger failed to seem dangerous. Snow cracked under my feet and caked the wool of my leggings. I wrapped my father’s hunting cloak tight about me. I walked because I could no longer run. Before me, the beast’s tracks softened under new-fallen snow, and with every moment, new flakes conspired to hide them further. The sword strapped to my back grew heavy, and I doubted my strength, even if the opportunity came. My daughter’s doom whispered with every pine branch that brushed against me. Gone.

Gone. Gone.

Slowly, the hunter within me–hard as stone and untouched by years of a different woman’s life–woke. Her eyes saw the fading edges of the beast’s track as time: two hours ahead of me, then three hours, then four. Her mind evaluated my shuffling stride and leaden hands. She tried to smile with my numbed lips; I felt her grim amusement. She knew a dead woman when she saw one.
I fell without knowing that I fell. My foot touched the snow. My knee touched it. My hip. My shoulders. The soft white filled my mouth and nose and eyes. It tasted like rain. I pressed my hands down, trying to rise, and the earth passed through my fingers like fog.

Iron-Eyes and the Watered Down World

by Saladin Ahmed

Zok Ironeyes stared at the tilecard table before him and cursed softly as Hai Hai clacked down the Dragoness tile with a gloating grunt.

Hai Hai looked up from the table and locked her shiny black eyes on the innkeeper, her nose and whiskers twitching. The scraggle-haired, red faced fool avoided Hai Hai’s gaze with the shame of a man who’d been caught staring. Zok couldn’t fault the innkeeper’s curiosity. The man had probably seen only a handful of rabbitmen in his life, for few of Hai Hai’s people ever made it this far south. But if the proprietor of the preposterously-named King’s Crest Inn didn’t watch himself, he was like to get his nose broken at least. Hai Hai wasn’t one to indulge untraveled bumpkins’ gawking.

Insect Joy

by Caspian Gray

The crickets started screaming after Luis came back from the war. Theirs was the lowest form of communication; they did not so much exchange ideas as alternate between different ways of expressing alarm. When Amy noticed they were out of water gel and took their bowl to refill it, they screamed. When she sprinkled calcium powder on their food, they screamed. When she cleaned the tiny bodies of their dead brethren out of the cage, they screamed.

It was tiresome.

Outside, now that each night brought frost, the world was quiet. There were the last dying flutters of cecropia moths, blown along the sidewalk like dead leaves. The swarms of ladybugs were already burrowed deep into schools and churches and people’s homes, where occasionally she heard them chirring to each other. She’d met a single dragonfly, perhaps the last one of November, perched in the sun on her front door, but that dragonfly was too tired or too old to speak.

Only the feeder crickets at the store were still trying to express their mangled lives.