The Speculative Short Fiction of P. E. Cunningham, page 3
“But she’s okay?”
He peered down at me kinda funny. “Yeah. She’ll be okay.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. Then he got right to the point. “You saw the news?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They won’t find a driver.”
So he wasn’t going to try yanking me. I told you he was cool. “Because there wasn’t any driver. Was there?”
He was staring at the curb too, at the Jag sitting there all quiet and normal. Just a car. “I don’t have any explanations, or I’d offer one. The wild car theory’s the best I can do, and that’s just a fairy tale. What I need to know is what you’re telling the other kids.”
“Nothing. I didn’t say a word. And I’m not going to.” Except maybe later to Ed, in private, so he wouldn’t go crazy and get locked away or something. He saved Mike and Andy. We owed him. “I’m eleven. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
He accepted that. But I had to ask. “So what about 17?”
That got me a shrug, and his full-on smile. “What can I say? She’s a cop.”
We had a laugh, then he left. The next day I had an earnest talk with Ed, and we swore on our souls never to tell. Days passed and no body turned up at the quarry. Then somebody knocked over the convenience store on Coventry Pike, and life got back to normal. The Hit and Run Homicides dropped off the news and gradually faded away.
***
The average cop car, Joel told me once, only stays in use about three years. But Officer Will wouldn’t give up 17. He even offered to buy her. So the borough kept her in service. As long as she wanted to run, they were willing to let her.
About five years after the fight at the quarry, Officer Will responded to a domestic disturbance call. On Wanner Road, of all places. Some guy got to fighting with his wife, and it spilled outside. Officer Will tried to calm the guy down. The guy pulled a gun and shot him three times point blank in the chest. Car 17 ran up onto the lawn and rammed the guy and pinned him up against the side of his own house and held him there until backup arrived. Officer Will died at the scene.
After the guy got lugged off to jail and the ambulance took Officer Will, they tried to move 17. She wouldn’t budge. Her engine wouldn’t even turn over. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong ‘cause she hadn’t even been shot at. Finally the borough sent a tow truck, and they hauled her to the garage.
That was the story of Officer Will and Car 17. I’d never told the whole thing through to anybody, but I told it to her, lying there under her chassis where no one but she could hear me. Reminding her of what she was and what she meant to us. “I know you’re hurting. We all are. We all miss him. But you’re different. You’re a cop. You have to go back out there. It’s your duty. He wouldn’t want you rusting out behind some garage. He’d want you out on the street, stopping speeders and killer cars and stuff. Protecting and serving, like it says on your door. You can’t just let that go.”
She didn’t make any noises, so I don’t know if she was listening. But I heard footsteps on the gravel. One set was Joel’s sneakers. The other was boots. “Okay, kid,” somebody said. “Get out of there.”
I rolled out from under 17. The boots belonged to Herschel Wertz, Simpson’s son-in-law and the guy who ran Simpson’s Garage. Joel’s boss. Joel was standing next to him and looking about ten years old, more scared for his job than for me. “He said he could fix her,” he babbled. “I’m really backed up, and there’s nobody here, and I know him and he’s okay with cars, so I—”
“Broke the rules,” Wertz cut him off. Joel shut up. The guy looked at me, then at 17. I think his eyes softened, just a little. Everyone had liked Officer Will. “Any luck with her?” he asked me.
“I dunno,” I said. “I did what I could.”
He nodded. “You’re Chuck, right? I’ve heard good things about you. But don’t push it again. Now get lost.” I bobbed my head and ducked past him, but he’d already turned his glare on Joel. “As for you—”
Whatever Joel meant to blather got lost in the rumble of 17’s engine turning over. It stopped me cold and dropped Joel’s jaw. Wertz went “Huh?” and ambled over to look.
Her hood was still up. There was her engine, purring away, all her belts and pistons running like they were supposed to.
“You said you couldn’t find anything wrong with her,” Wertz said to Joel. “Maybe I should give the kid your job.”
“It was just a couple wires,” I said. “Could’ve got knocked loose anywhere. Joel would’ve found ‘em the minute he put her up on the rack.”
“Uh-huh.” Wertz peered down at the engine. Joel sidled around him and stuck his hand in through the open driver’s side window. Car 17’s engine shut off. Wertz looked from Joel to me, then to 17. “I’ll cut you both a break this time. Get that car roadworthy so we can get it back to the department. You know how much them things cost?”
He stalked off toward his office, head cocked to watch us to make sure we followed. We dutifully trotted after him. Joel’s face was pasty, and he wouldn’t look back at 17. Maybe he was thinking, like I was, how her keys were still in his pocket.
***
They got Car 17 a new partner and put her back out on the street. The new cop’s name was Tanya Munoz; she transferred in from Collier. Joel said she had a solid record as a cop. I wondered how well she knew cars.
Pretty well, it turned out. Her dad had been a mechanic. She took her new job seriously, and treated her patrol car with respect. Pretty soon the stories started cropping up again: robbers busted, carjackers thwarted, speeders chased down and caught by the lady cop in the car that did things it shouldn’t’ve. Officer Tanya took it in stride. “A cop’s a cop,” she said to a bunch of us once, and patted 17’s hood. “The lady and I are here to get the bad guys off the streets. Make the world a safer place for you kids. And speaking of safety, you on the bike, why aren’t you wearing a helmet?”
No need to worry about Officer Tanya and her car. They were both in good hands.
***
So that’s how it happened, back when I was eleven, and back when I was sixteen. No, it didn’t make me want to be a cop, or a mechanic. I’m aiming to become a teacher. Who’d’ve imagined that?
The end came while I was away at school. Joel told me about it. There was some accident, and Officer Tanya and Car 17 were racing to the scene. Some guy on a cell phone ran a stop sign and plowed into them. Car 17 got knocked into the path of a truck, and her front end got smashed all to hell. Officer Tanya was pretty banged up, too, but she still crawled out of the wreckage and insisted on arresting the guy before the EMTs loaded her into the ambulance. “I never saw her,” the other driver insisted, even though she had her lights on and her siren blaring. I heard he was thinking of suing the borough, something about speeding police putting innocent people at risk.
They took Officer Tanya to the hospital and 17 to the garage. Joel wasn’t working there anymore, but he still knew people. When he heard about Car 17, he went down to the garage and they let him in, like he’d let me in umpteen years ago.
It was bad, he told me. Her frame was skewed, and her engine was cracked in three places. But the worst, he said, was when he touched her. She’d always felt a little warm to the touch, he said, especially on the hood, even when the engine’d been off for hours. Now it just felt like cold, dead metal. “Dead” being the word that rang hardest in his mind.
There was no fixing her, so they scrapped her. Took her to the junkyard and crushed the remains. Whatever’d been in her was long gone by then, so I don’t think she felt anything.
***
I went by the graveyard my last trip home, to check out a rumor I’d heard. It turned out to be true. Somebody’d put a car’s steering wheel on Officer’s Will’s grave, leaning up on the headstone. The maintenance crew had left it there, and no mourners or kids had touched it.
I wanted it to be 17’s, so I told myself it was.
MONKEY SEE…
P. E. Cunningham
Published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008
P. E. Cunningham assures us that no animals were harmed during the creation of this story.
***
Seen from the Western Road, the village didn’t look like the type of place to pose any threat to the Emperor. Ji sat her horse and assessed it with a warrior’s eye. No walls, no fortifications. The fields across the road were green with crops, but small. Doubtful they produced enough food in a season to support the populace, let alone a substantial fighting force.
The only defensible edifice sat atop a bare hillock overlooking the village. The two-story house had obviously been designed to copy the lofty palace in the City of Wonders. Out here it would no doubt pass for a mansion, or had at one time. Even from the road it looked run-down and shabby. Unless the curve of the hillock concealed a barracks, there was no way that place up there could house an army either.
And the threat of war had traveled east from here? Ji shook her head.
Yet there was the strip of parchment in her pocket, arrived at the palace by carrier hawk, with a scrawled warning on it, and Kaito’s mark. Kaito was a clever man and a skillful spy and never given to panic. She stared at the village some more.
“What do you think?” she asked Shakaru. “Are we in the right place?”
The directions were accurate, the soul sword she wore strapped to her back whispered in her mind. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this place. I sense magic here.
Ji snorted. “From where? That wreck on the hill? That barn over there? I know wizards, Shakaru. They don’t live in squalor. Perhaps an army did pass through here and they had a wizard with them. If so, they’ve long moved on.”
And I know zhindi warriors. They don’t discount the warnings of their swords. There’s something off about this place. Tread carefully.
“As you say,” she muttered. Zhindi, yes, but still new to the title, without yet even any battle-born nicks on her armor. Still, she felt confident she could carry out this simple task for the Emperor, without any undue nagging from Shakaru.
She kneed her horse forward and walked it up the silent street, all her senses alert for signs of trouble. It was a quiet place, for a supposed hotbed of belligerence. You’d think a town on the brink of war would ring with the sound of swords on the forge and the creak of battle wagons and the neighs of horses and the shouts of men. But no noises reached her beyond the trill of birds and the cries of startled monkeys. She spotted one horse, standing untethered before a smithy, with three monkeys clinging to its back and picking fleas off its coat. The smithy was empty, its fires cold ash. Ji frowned and rode on.
By the time she’d passed the halfway point, she’d decided the village held no human life. The monkeys convinced her of that. The wretched little things were everywhere, in the houses, on the roofs, peering out at her from open windows and behind doors left ajar. A line of them paralleled her course up on the rooftops. Their chatter implied either warning or threat, she couldn’t determine which.
“It’s deserted,” she said. “Perhaps that army Kaito spoke of moved to a better position. There may be cause for concern after all.”
It can’t be deserted, Shakaru said. I feel human life all around us.
“Where?” Ji stared at a silk-merchant’s shop. Little monkey faces peeked out at her from behind bolts of shimmering fabric. “I tell you, they’ve moved on.”
Not all of them.
“No? Then where—” She stopped, and sniffed. Beneath the odor of dust and rot she caught a whiff of frying fish and boiling lentils. So. Unless the monkeys had learned to cook, the village still held at least one human occupant. Ji urged her horse in that direction.
The aromas emanated from a small inn just off the main street, snuggled up against a bare cliff that formed the southern face of the hillock. Someone had fixed a rope ladder to the cliff. No doubt it led to the mansion above. She marked its position as she reined in her horse before the inn. She dismounted, drew Shakaru, and slipped inside.
Unlike the rest of this empty village, the dining room showed signs of upkeep. Perhaps the monkeys had done it. Five of them chased each other noisily over the tables and chairs. They skidded to five separate, startled halts and stared up at her. Four shrieked and fled toward the source of the fish smell—the kitchen, Ji surmised—but the fifth charged her, miniature tusks bared in threat. The male, no doubt.
Ji was no stranger to monkeys, having eaten quite a few in her childhood. She captured him easily. He screeched and thrashed in her grip. “You’re a fat one,” she murmured. “Who is it’s been cooking for you?”
A deeper, only slightly more human scream burst from the kitchen doorway. Ji glanced up. The man was as skinny as a grasshopper, and armed with a ladle. He rushed at Ji. She tossed the monkey away and set herself to meet him. He veered and dropped his ladle and dove for the monkey instead. He caught it out of the air and clutched it to his chest like a favored infant. The monkey howled and sank its fingers into his lank, greasy hair.
For a moment they gawked at each other, Ji wary, the man dumbfounded. Finally his stare dropped from her face to the Imperial sigil on her breastplate. He blinked and set the monkey aside. It scampered into the kitchen.
“You’re real?” he said in a creaky voice. “You’re human?”
“I’ve come from the Emperor,” Ji said. “We’ve heard rumors of an army massing in these parts. I was sent to investigate—”
“You can’t stay here.” The man scrambled up and caught her arm and tried to shove her out the door. “You have to go now, before he discovers you’re here—”
Ji set her feet and refused to budge. The man wrestled harder. He started to whimper. “Before who discovers me?” Ji demanded.
The man’s gaze darted over her shoulder, out the doorway and into the street. He croaked and shoved away from her, then dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor. “Lord Shibo.”
Ji whirled, holding Shakaru up and at the ready. Seconds later she lowered him again. This was no wizard or warlord. The man outside was, if anything, even filthier than the cook. His limbs were long and spindly and attached to a compact trunk. He stood in a kind of bow-legged hunch. He carried no weapons. His armor, if one could call it that, was a mishmash of ill-fitting pieces that looked as if he’d scavenged them off a battlefield, and from the losing side. Tufts of wiry, reddish hair stuck out from behind the bits of armor and from underneath his oversized helmet. His eyes were huge and almond-gold, with next to no white in them.
Those eyes fixed on Shakaru now; with such greed Ji nearly backed a step. “A sword!” he exulted, in a voice as shrill as the shrieks of the monkeys. “Now I can go to war!” He lunged through the doorway with hands outstretched.
He was quick, she granted him that. But demented, to try to grab a sword by the blade. Especially a soul sword. She sidestepped easily and swatted the pathetic creature on his backside with the flat of her blade as he stumbled past. The “warlord” hit the floor. The prostrate cook moaned in misery.
Scarcely had he touched the floor than he bounded up again. This time, instead of charging, he bounced up and down and showed his teeth. They were quite large, and a hideous yellow. “My sword! Mine! I’m going to war and I must have a sword! Give it to me!”
He’s mad, Ji decided. Maybe they both are. Something in the water or the food? Perhaps that’s why the others left. “I think I’ll keep the sword for now. Tell me what happened to this village. Where did the people go?”
“People? People?” The “warlord” stopped bouncing and giggled. “Gone! All gone! I did that! Me! I’m going to war. Men go to war, and I’m a man. I want that sword! Give it here!”
“Lord Shibo, please.” The cook tugged at a swatch of the man’s ragged tunic. “You will have your sword. But first, why not a cup of tea? And lunch. I’ve prepared the lemon fish, your favorite—”
“No! No time to eat! I have to go to war!” His shouting rose beyond words, into an inarticulate screech. Ji winced. The monkeys sounded more melodious.
Shakaru? she mentally whispered. Is he crazy? What do we do?
Lift me back up into guard position. I can’t get an accurate sense of him. There’s magic at work here. It’s muddying things—
The “warlord’s” screech broke off abruptly. He giggled, showing off those stained, enormous teeth. “You can’t keep the sword if you can’t hold onto it. Ya mano hanu rii!”
The air around Ji seemed to solidify and crush in upon her. It pressed here, squeezed there, pinched in other places. She felt as if she were a sheet of paper compacted in a fist. Or maybe more like folded, like the little origami pieces Kaito liked to make. She hadn’t even breath to cry out. Shakaru, suddenly impossibly heavy, tumbled from her hands. He clattered on the floor.
Instantly the grinning madman swooped in and scooped him up. He danced with glee across the floor. “Mine! Mine now! My sword to go to war with! Now I’m a man!” He galloped into the street and disappeared.
Shakaru’s dwindling protests pierced Ji’s head like assassins’ daggers. Some zhindi. How could she lose him like that? She struggled up.
Wait. What was wrong with her arms? These weren’t her arms. They were too long and spindly. And where was her armor? And where had all this fur come from?
Oh no. Guardian gods of the zhindi, no....
She squinted her eyes shut, turned her head, and cautiously cracked one eyelid open. There was a tail back there. Her tail.
Her roar of protest came out as a high-pitched shriek. The monkeys peering at her through the kitchen doorway ducked out of sight again.
“I tried to warn you,” the cook said. He lifted her easily in one hand. Ji was too stunned to protest. “Well, now you’re here with the rest of us. You’ll just have to make the best of it. Would you like some tea?”
He peered down at me kinda funny. “Yeah. She’ll be okay.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. Then he got right to the point. “You saw the news?”
“Uh-huh.”
“They won’t find a driver.”
So he wasn’t going to try yanking me. I told you he was cool. “Because there wasn’t any driver. Was there?”
He was staring at the curb too, at the Jag sitting there all quiet and normal. Just a car. “I don’t have any explanations, or I’d offer one. The wild car theory’s the best I can do, and that’s just a fairy tale. What I need to know is what you’re telling the other kids.”
“Nothing. I didn’t say a word. And I’m not going to.” Except maybe later to Ed, in private, so he wouldn’t go crazy and get locked away or something. He saved Mike and Andy. We owed him. “I’m eleven. That doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
He accepted that. But I had to ask. “So what about 17?”
That got me a shrug, and his full-on smile. “What can I say? She’s a cop.”
We had a laugh, then he left. The next day I had an earnest talk with Ed, and we swore on our souls never to tell. Days passed and no body turned up at the quarry. Then somebody knocked over the convenience store on Coventry Pike, and life got back to normal. The Hit and Run Homicides dropped off the news and gradually faded away.
***
The average cop car, Joel told me once, only stays in use about three years. But Officer Will wouldn’t give up 17. He even offered to buy her. So the borough kept her in service. As long as she wanted to run, they were willing to let her.
About five years after the fight at the quarry, Officer Will responded to a domestic disturbance call. On Wanner Road, of all places. Some guy got to fighting with his wife, and it spilled outside. Officer Will tried to calm the guy down. The guy pulled a gun and shot him three times point blank in the chest. Car 17 ran up onto the lawn and rammed the guy and pinned him up against the side of his own house and held him there until backup arrived. Officer Will died at the scene.
After the guy got lugged off to jail and the ambulance took Officer Will, they tried to move 17. She wouldn’t budge. Her engine wouldn’t even turn over. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong ‘cause she hadn’t even been shot at. Finally the borough sent a tow truck, and they hauled her to the garage.
That was the story of Officer Will and Car 17. I’d never told the whole thing through to anybody, but I told it to her, lying there under her chassis where no one but she could hear me. Reminding her of what she was and what she meant to us. “I know you’re hurting. We all are. We all miss him. But you’re different. You’re a cop. You have to go back out there. It’s your duty. He wouldn’t want you rusting out behind some garage. He’d want you out on the street, stopping speeders and killer cars and stuff. Protecting and serving, like it says on your door. You can’t just let that go.”
She didn’t make any noises, so I don’t know if she was listening. But I heard footsteps on the gravel. One set was Joel’s sneakers. The other was boots. “Okay, kid,” somebody said. “Get out of there.”
I rolled out from under 17. The boots belonged to Herschel Wertz, Simpson’s son-in-law and the guy who ran Simpson’s Garage. Joel’s boss. Joel was standing next to him and looking about ten years old, more scared for his job than for me. “He said he could fix her,” he babbled. “I’m really backed up, and there’s nobody here, and I know him and he’s okay with cars, so I—”
“Broke the rules,” Wertz cut him off. Joel shut up. The guy looked at me, then at 17. I think his eyes softened, just a little. Everyone had liked Officer Will. “Any luck with her?” he asked me.
“I dunno,” I said. “I did what I could.”
He nodded. “You’re Chuck, right? I’ve heard good things about you. But don’t push it again. Now get lost.” I bobbed my head and ducked past him, but he’d already turned his glare on Joel. “As for you—”
Whatever Joel meant to blather got lost in the rumble of 17’s engine turning over. It stopped me cold and dropped Joel’s jaw. Wertz went “Huh?” and ambled over to look.
Her hood was still up. There was her engine, purring away, all her belts and pistons running like they were supposed to.
“You said you couldn’t find anything wrong with her,” Wertz said to Joel. “Maybe I should give the kid your job.”
“It was just a couple wires,” I said. “Could’ve got knocked loose anywhere. Joel would’ve found ‘em the minute he put her up on the rack.”
“Uh-huh.” Wertz peered down at the engine. Joel sidled around him and stuck his hand in through the open driver’s side window. Car 17’s engine shut off. Wertz looked from Joel to me, then to 17. “I’ll cut you both a break this time. Get that car roadworthy so we can get it back to the department. You know how much them things cost?”
He stalked off toward his office, head cocked to watch us to make sure we followed. We dutifully trotted after him. Joel’s face was pasty, and he wouldn’t look back at 17. Maybe he was thinking, like I was, how her keys were still in his pocket.
***
They got Car 17 a new partner and put her back out on the street. The new cop’s name was Tanya Munoz; she transferred in from Collier. Joel said she had a solid record as a cop. I wondered how well she knew cars.
Pretty well, it turned out. Her dad had been a mechanic. She took her new job seriously, and treated her patrol car with respect. Pretty soon the stories started cropping up again: robbers busted, carjackers thwarted, speeders chased down and caught by the lady cop in the car that did things it shouldn’t’ve. Officer Tanya took it in stride. “A cop’s a cop,” she said to a bunch of us once, and patted 17’s hood. “The lady and I are here to get the bad guys off the streets. Make the world a safer place for you kids. And speaking of safety, you on the bike, why aren’t you wearing a helmet?”
No need to worry about Officer Tanya and her car. They were both in good hands.
***
So that’s how it happened, back when I was eleven, and back when I was sixteen. No, it didn’t make me want to be a cop, or a mechanic. I’m aiming to become a teacher. Who’d’ve imagined that?
The end came while I was away at school. Joel told me about it. There was some accident, and Officer Tanya and Car 17 were racing to the scene. Some guy on a cell phone ran a stop sign and plowed into them. Car 17 got knocked into the path of a truck, and her front end got smashed all to hell. Officer Tanya was pretty banged up, too, but she still crawled out of the wreckage and insisted on arresting the guy before the EMTs loaded her into the ambulance. “I never saw her,” the other driver insisted, even though she had her lights on and her siren blaring. I heard he was thinking of suing the borough, something about speeding police putting innocent people at risk.
They took Officer Tanya to the hospital and 17 to the garage. Joel wasn’t working there anymore, but he still knew people. When he heard about Car 17, he went down to the garage and they let him in, like he’d let me in umpteen years ago.
It was bad, he told me. Her frame was skewed, and her engine was cracked in three places. But the worst, he said, was when he touched her. She’d always felt a little warm to the touch, he said, especially on the hood, even when the engine’d been off for hours. Now it just felt like cold, dead metal. “Dead” being the word that rang hardest in his mind.
There was no fixing her, so they scrapped her. Took her to the junkyard and crushed the remains. Whatever’d been in her was long gone by then, so I don’t think she felt anything.
***
I went by the graveyard my last trip home, to check out a rumor I’d heard. It turned out to be true. Somebody’d put a car’s steering wheel on Officer’s Will’s grave, leaning up on the headstone. The maintenance crew had left it there, and no mourners or kids had touched it.
I wanted it to be 17’s, so I told myself it was.
MONKEY SEE…
P. E. Cunningham
Published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2008
P. E. Cunningham assures us that no animals were harmed during the creation of this story.
***
Seen from the Western Road, the village didn’t look like the type of place to pose any threat to the Emperor. Ji sat her horse and assessed it with a warrior’s eye. No walls, no fortifications. The fields across the road were green with crops, but small. Doubtful they produced enough food in a season to support the populace, let alone a substantial fighting force.
The only defensible edifice sat atop a bare hillock overlooking the village. The two-story house had obviously been designed to copy the lofty palace in the City of Wonders. Out here it would no doubt pass for a mansion, or had at one time. Even from the road it looked run-down and shabby. Unless the curve of the hillock concealed a barracks, there was no way that place up there could house an army either.
And the threat of war had traveled east from here? Ji shook her head.
Yet there was the strip of parchment in her pocket, arrived at the palace by carrier hawk, with a scrawled warning on it, and Kaito’s mark. Kaito was a clever man and a skillful spy and never given to panic. She stared at the village some more.
“What do you think?” she asked Shakaru. “Are we in the right place?”
The directions were accurate, the soul sword she wore strapped to her back whispered in her mind. I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this place. I sense magic here.
Ji snorted. “From where? That wreck on the hill? That barn over there? I know wizards, Shakaru. They don’t live in squalor. Perhaps an army did pass through here and they had a wizard with them. If so, they’ve long moved on.”
And I know zhindi warriors. They don’t discount the warnings of their swords. There’s something off about this place. Tread carefully.
“As you say,” she muttered. Zhindi, yes, but still new to the title, without yet even any battle-born nicks on her armor. Still, she felt confident she could carry out this simple task for the Emperor, without any undue nagging from Shakaru.
She kneed her horse forward and walked it up the silent street, all her senses alert for signs of trouble. It was a quiet place, for a supposed hotbed of belligerence. You’d think a town on the brink of war would ring with the sound of swords on the forge and the creak of battle wagons and the neighs of horses and the shouts of men. But no noises reached her beyond the trill of birds and the cries of startled monkeys. She spotted one horse, standing untethered before a smithy, with three monkeys clinging to its back and picking fleas off its coat. The smithy was empty, its fires cold ash. Ji frowned and rode on.
By the time she’d passed the halfway point, she’d decided the village held no human life. The monkeys convinced her of that. The wretched little things were everywhere, in the houses, on the roofs, peering out at her from open windows and behind doors left ajar. A line of them paralleled her course up on the rooftops. Their chatter implied either warning or threat, she couldn’t determine which.
“It’s deserted,” she said. “Perhaps that army Kaito spoke of moved to a better position. There may be cause for concern after all.”
It can’t be deserted, Shakaru said. I feel human life all around us.
“Where?” Ji stared at a silk-merchant’s shop. Little monkey faces peeked out at her from behind bolts of shimmering fabric. “I tell you, they’ve moved on.”
Not all of them.
“No? Then where—” She stopped, and sniffed. Beneath the odor of dust and rot she caught a whiff of frying fish and boiling lentils. So. Unless the monkeys had learned to cook, the village still held at least one human occupant. Ji urged her horse in that direction.
The aromas emanated from a small inn just off the main street, snuggled up against a bare cliff that formed the southern face of the hillock. Someone had fixed a rope ladder to the cliff. No doubt it led to the mansion above. She marked its position as she reined in her horse before the inn. She dismounted, drew Shakaru, and slipped inside.
Unlike the rest of this empty village, the dining room showed signs of upkeep. Perhaps the monkeys had done it. Five of them chased each other noisily over the tables and chairs. They skidded to five separate, startled halts and stared up at her. Four shrieked and fled toward the source of the fish smell—the kitchen, Ji surmised—but the fifth charged her, miniature tusks bared in threat. The male, no doubt.
Ji was no stranger to monkeys, having eaten quite a few in her childhood. She captured him easily. He screeched and thrashed in her grip. “You’re a fat one,” she murmured. “Who is it’s been cooking for you?”
A deeper, only slightly more human scream burst from the kitchen doorway. Ji glanced up. The man was as skinny as a grasshopper, and armed with a ladle. He rushed at Ji. She tossed the monkey away and set herself to meet him. He veered and dropped his ladle and dove for the monkey instead. He caught it out of the air and clutched it to his chest like a favored infant. The monkey howled and sank its fingers into his lank, greasy hair.
For a moment they gawked at each other, Ji wary, the man dumbfounded. Finally his stare dropped from her face to the Imperial sigil on her breastplate. He blinked and set the monkey aside. It scampered into the kitchen.
“You’re real?” he said in a creaky voice. “You’re human?”
“I’ve come from the Emperor,” Ji said. “We’ve heard rumors of an army massing in these parts. I was sent to investigate—”
“You can’t stay here.” The man scrambled up and caught her arm and tried to shove her out the door. “You have to go now, before he discovers you’re here—”
Ji set her feet and refused to budge. The man wrestled harder. He started to whimper. “Before who discovers me?” Ji demanded.
The man’s gaze darted over her shoulder, out the doorway and into the street. He croaked and shoved away from her, then dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor. “Lord Shibo.”
Ji whirled, holding Shakaru up and at the ready. Seconds later she lowered him again. This was no wizard or warlord. The man outside was, if anything, even filthier than the cook. His limbs were long and spindly and attached to a compact trunk. He stood in a kind of bow-legged hunch. He carried no weapons. His armor, if one could call it that, was a mishmash of ill-fitting pieces that looked as if he’d scavenged them off a battlefield, and from the losing side. Tufts of wiry, reddish hair stuck out from behind the bits of armor and from underneath his oversized helmet. His eyes were huge and almond-gold, with next to no white in them.
Those eyes fixed on Shakaru now; with such greed Ji nearly backed a step. “A sword!” he exulted, in a voice as shrill as the shrieks of the monkeys. “Now I can go to war!” He lunged through the doorway with hands outstretched.
He was quick, she granted him that. But demented, to try to grab a sword by the blade. Especially a soul sword. She sidestepped easily and swatted the pathetic creature on his backside with the flat of her blade as he stumbled past. The “warlord” hit the floor. The prostrate cook moaned in misery.
Scarcely had he touched the floor than he bounded up again. This time, instead of charging, he bounced up and down and showed his teeth. They were quite large, and a hideous yellow. “My sword! Mine! I’m going to war and I must have a sword! Give it to me!”
He’s mad, Ji decided. Maybe they both are. Something in the water or the food? Perhaps that’s why the others left. “I think I’ll keep the sword for now. Tell me what happened to this village. Where did the people go?”
“People? People?” The “warlord” stopped bouncing and giggled. “Gone! All gone! I did that! Me! I’m going to war. Men go to war, and I’m a man. I want that sword! Give it here!”
“Lord Shibo, please.” The cook tugged at a swatch of the man’s ragged tunic. “You will have your sword. But first, why not a cup of tea? And lunch. I’ve prepared the lemon fish, your favorite—”
“No! No time to eat! I have to go to war!” His shouting rose beyond words, into an inarticulate screech. Ji winced. The monkeys sounded more melodious.
Shakaru? she mentally whispered. Is he crazy? What do we do?
Lift me back up into guard position. I can’t get an accurate sense of him. There’s magic at work here. It’s muddying things—
The “warlord’s” screech broke off abruptly. He giggled, showing off those stained, enormous teeth. “You can’t keep the sword if you can’t hold onto it. Ya mano hanu rii!”
The air around Ji seemed to solidify and crush in upon her. It pressed here, squeezed there, pinched in other places. She felt as if she were a sheet of paper compacted in a fist. Or maybe more like folded, like the little origami pieces Kaito liked to make. She hadn’t even breath to cry out. Shakaru, suddenly impossibly heavy, tumbled from her hands. He clattered on the floor.
Instantly the grinning madman swooped in and scooped him up. He danced with glee across the floor. “Mine! Mine now! My sword to go to war with! Now I’m a man!” He galloped into the street and disappeared.
Shakaru’s dwindling protests pierced Ji’s head like assassins’ daggers. Some zhindi. How could she lose him like that? She struggled up.
Wait. What was wrong with her arms? These weren’t her arms. They were too long and spindly. And where was her armor? And where had all this fur come from?
Oh no. Guardian gods of the zhindi, no....
She squinted her eyes shut, turned her head, and cautiously cracked one eyelid open. There was a tail back there. Her tail.
Her roar of protest came out as a high-pitched shriek. The monkeys peering at her through the kitchen doorway ducked out of sight again.
“I tried to warn you,” the cook said. He lifted her easily in one hand. Ji was too stunned to protest. “Well, now you’re here with the rest of us. You’ll just have to make the best of it. Would you like some tea?”
