The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction JanuaryFebruary 2020 (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Book 138) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spilogale, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-11T22:00:00+00:00

9.

Brant had the chime in his hand. Melandra leaned closer. "May I see it?"

He held it up, still knotted to the fraying leather thong. A vessel of brass the size of her thumb, its shape recalling a rosebud just beginning to open, with a ring on its stopper. Such a tiny thing to hold a spirit.

But how large could a spirit be?

She had a terrible idea, a treasonous idea. It gnawed at the back of her mind, making promises she made herself ignore. The closer she got to finishing the statue, the more insistent the idea became. A chime and a spark. Two sparks. A profane impossibility. Not to be thought of, though she had been thinking of it constantly while she worked the last details into the statue's face. All that remained were the hands, and the tricky problem of the base, which had been plaguing her for weeks. Melandra retreated from her flight of cowardice, comforted by the way work always rose up to take her mind from other things.

"How long had Moro been gone when you broke the spear?" she asked.

"Months," he said. "I don't know exactly. While he was fading, he spoke to me less and less often. That last silence…it took a long time before I understood he was really gone." After a pause, he added, "Moro would have told me not to join that militia."

Such a burden , she thought. One life taken. Two if he counted his father, but strangely he didn't appear to, or seemed to place that in a different category from the dead hillman. To Melandra, they sounded much the same. She knew a great many stories of brutal fathers whose sons had at last answered violence with violence. She also knew many stories of war. How many men in Borea would have nodded with recognition hearing Brant's tales? Still, it was sad. Melandra could not recall being sad over a killing. How many deaths had she witnessed? Only her mother's, when she was barely old enough to remember it. She knew of many others, but her father had protected her from seeing them. She had seen executions, of course, and the one Commission ceremony. But those were spectacles, pageants of justice and power. Not occasions for compassion or mourning.

Was that how all the assembled strangers at the unveiling would view her death? As a notable incident, conveying status to those present? Nobody would keep her spirit in their hearts, or in a tiny chime. She had already passed into the annals of Ie Fure as one of those honored with the Imperator's Commission. No citizen save perhaps her father would think of her in any other way—and, if she were candid with herself, Melandra would have to admit that even to her father, the honor of the Imperator's Commission would matter more than the loss of his daughter. After her mother's death, he had always treated Melandra more like a cherished work of art than a daughter. She was something to be applauded, admired from a distance.

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