Chicks’nChainedMales

CONTENTS

I know what you’re thinking and I want you to stop it right this minute.

Don’t try denying it. We both know the first thing that popped into your mind when you read the title of this book. I’d tell you that you really ought to be ashamed of yourself, but Who Am I To Judge? Besides, for all I know, you’ve already got a career in politics and my mama didn’t raise any kids who like to pound sand down rat-holes.

Perhaps I should explain what this book is really about: It’s about women rescuing men. There. Perfectly innocent. Wholesome and admirable, even. When I first came up with the title/concept for the Chicks in Chainmail series, one of my noble goals was to give the doughty Woman Warrior of fantasy fiction something different to do, a nice change from stomping around the landscape with a permanent grouch on, slaughtering any who dared oppose her (or worse, tried telling her to “Lighten up!”), and using her days off to go to the local tavern, get drunk, and have some out-of-work sailor tattoo the phrase All Men Are Worthless Scum Except For Breeding Purposes somewhere on her body guaranteed to upset her mother. (Unless, of course, she’d learned the whole stomp, slaughter ’n’ swill routine from Mom herself.)

Here I must admit that when I was told that lo, the title of this book was to be Chicks and Chained Males, initially I reacted in much the same way as you did. (Yes, you did so too! ’Fess up and be done with it.) But how much greater was my startlement when I learned whence came the aforementioned title!

As those of you already familiar with these modest volumes may recall, the title of the first Chicks in Chainmail anthology (still available; buy many copies) caused a momentary access of trepidation on the part of Our Revered Publisher. This was understandable since, as he himself stated in the Disclaimer on the back of said book, he is a Sensitive, Nineties Kind of Guy.

Well, guess what? The Nineties are almost over. Maybe it’s the approaching millenium, maybe it’s ascribable to the ripple effect of the dreaded Y2K Bug, but for whatever reason, he is the one who came up with the title for the book you are presently holding in your dainty hands.

I think this is laudable, commendable, praiseworthy, and the rest of the synonyms in my on-line thesaurus for, as you may also recall from my introduction to the original Chicks in Chainmail, it was my desire to show the world that women can be strong and still be able to take a joke. (In fact, laughter when the joke’s on you is a pretty good gauge of just how secure in your strength you are. Ever notice what happens to a whole lot of political humorists under certain military dictatorships? Ow.)

By giving us this title, Our Revered Publisher has demonstrated that Sensitive Nineties Guys can also own up to a sense of humor without relinquishing one inch of the moral high ground. Has the shining example of favorable public reaction to Chicks in Chainmail been instrumental in this epiphany? Have I, in some miniscule manner, been responsible for facilitating this cognitive evolution? Might we not interpret this consequence to signify that we have, in some fashion, rescued yet another man from the meshes of a misleading-if-well-intentioned ideology? (Oooh, I just love my on-line thesaurus!) I like to think so. It makes me quietly proud. In fact, there is one aspect above all others connected with this book and all associated therewith for which I am deeply, truly, and warmly grateful:

This time, I get the Disclaimer. It’s mine, do you hear? Mine! Minemineminemine . . . mine!

Enjoy.

Harry Turtledove studied Greek in college and has a doctorate in Byzantine history. He’s been selling fiction for over twenty years, won a Hugo, and has been a Nebula finalist. None of this has stopped him from “applying” the aforementioned knowledge and experience to creating the story that follows, for which I will be deeply grateful once I can stop laughing.

Myth Manners’ Guide to
Greek Missology #1:
Andromeda and Persueus

by Harry Turtledove

Andromeda was feeling the strain. “Why me?” she demanded. She’d figured Zeus wanted something from her when he invited her up to good old Mount Olympus for the weekend, but she’d thought it would be something else. She’d been ready to play along, too—how did you go about saying no to the king of the gods? You didn’t, not unless you were looking for a role in a tragedy. But . . . this?

“Why you?” Zeus eyed her as if he’d had something else in mind, too. But then he looked over at Hera, his wife, and got back to the business at hand. “Because you’re the right man—uh, the right person—for the job.”

“Yeah, right,” Andromeda said. “Don’t you think you’d do better having a man go out and fight the Gorgons? Isn’t that what men are for?—fighting, I mean.” She knew what else men were for, but she didn’t want to mention that to Zeus, not with Hera listening.

And Hera was listening. She said, “Men are useless—for fighting the Gorgons, I mean.” She sounded as if she meant a lot of other things, too. She was looking straight at Zeus.

No matter how she sounded, the king of the gods dipped his head in agreement. “My wife’s right.” By the sour look on his face, that sentence didn’t pass his lips every eternity. “The three Gorgons are fearsome foes. Whenever a man spies Cindy, Claudia, or Tyra, be it only for an instant, he turns to stone.”

“Part of him turns to stone, anyway,” Hera said acidly.

“And, so, you not being a man, you being a woman . . .” Zeus went on.

“Wait a minute. Wait just a linen-picking minute,” Andromeda broke in. “You’re not a man, either, or not exactly a man. You’re a god. Why don’t you go and take care of these Gorgons with the funny names your own self?”

Zeus coughed, then brightened. “Well, my dear, since you put it that way, maybe I ought to—”

“Not on your immortal life, Bubba,” Hera said. “You lay a hand on those hussies and you’re mythology.”

“You see how it is,” Zeus said to Andromeda. “My wife doesn’t understand me at all.”

Getting in the middle of an argument between god and goddess didn’t strike Andromeda as Phi Beta Kappa—or any other three letters of the Greek alphabet, either. Telling Zeus to find himself another boy—or girl—wouldn’t be the brightest thing since Phoebus Apollo, either. With a sigh, she said, “Okay. You’ve got me.” Zeus’ eyes lit up. Hera planted an elbow in his divine ribs. Hastily, Andromeda went on, “Now what do I have to do?”

“Here you are, my dear.” From behind his gold-and-ivory throne, Zeus produced a sword belt. He was about to buckle it on Andromeda—and probably let his fingers do a little extra walking while he was taking care of that—when Hera let out a sudden sharp cough. Sulkily, the king of the gods handed Andromeda the belt and let her put it on herself.

From behind her throne, Hera pulled out a brightly polished shield. “Here,” she said. “You may find this more useful against Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra than any blade. Phallic symbols, for some reason or other, don’t much frighten them.”

“Hey, sometimes a sword is just a sword,” Zeus protested.

“And sometimes it’s not, Mr. Swan, Mr. Shower-of-Gold, Mr. Bull—plenty of bull for all the girls from here to Nineveh, and I’m damned Tyred of it,” Hera said. Zeus fumed. Hera turned back to Andromeda. “If you look in the shield, you’ll get some idea of what I mean.”

“Is it safe?” Andromeda asked. As Zeus had, Hera dipped her head. Her divine husband was still sulking, and didn’t answer one way or the other. Andromeda cautiously looked. “I can see myself!” she exclaimed—not a claim she was likely to be able to make after washing earthenware plates, no matter the well from which the house slaves brought back the dishwashing liquid. A moment later, her hands flew to her hair. “Eeuw! I’m not so sure I want to.”

“It isn’t you, dearie—it’s the magic in the shield,” Hera said, not unkindly. “If you really looked like that, loverboy here wouldn’t be interested in feeling your pain . . . or anything else he could get his hands on.” She gave Zeus a cold and speculative stare. “At least, I don’t think he would. He’s not always fussy.”

A thunderbolt appeared in Zeus’ right hand. He tossed it up and down, hefting it and eyeing Hera. “Some of them—most of them, even—keep their mouths shut except when I want them to be open,” he said meaningfully.

Hera stood up to her full height, which was whatever she chose to make it. Andromeda didn’t quite come up to the goddess’ dimpled knee. “Well, I’d better be going,” she said hastily. If Zeus and Hera started at it hammer and tongs, they might not even notice charbroiling a more or less innocent mortal bystander by mistake.

Just finding Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra didn’t prove easy. Minor gods and goddesses weren’t allowed to set up shop on Olympus; they lowered surreal-estate values. Andromeda had to go through almost all of Midas’ Golden Pages before getting so much as a clue about where she ought to be looking.

Even then, she was puzzled. “Why on earth—or off it, for that matter—would they hang around with a no-account Roman goddess?” she asked.

“What, you think I hear everything?” Midas’ long, hairy, donkeyish ears twitched. “And why should I give a Phryg if I do hear things?” His ears twitched again, this time, Andromeda judged, in contempt. “You know about the Greek goddess of victory, don’t you?”

“Oh, everybody knows about her.” Andromeda sounded scornful, too. Since the Greeks had pretty much stopped winning victories, the goddess formerly in charge of them had gone into the running-shoe business, presumably to mitigate the agony of defeat on de feet. Nike had done a gangbanger business, too, till wing-footed Hermes hit her with a copyright-infringement suit that showed every sign of being as eternal as the gods.

“So there you are, then,” Midas said. “I don’t know what Victoria’s secret is, and I don’t give a darn.”

“That’s my shortstop,” Andromeda said absently, and let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “I’ll just have to go and find out for myself, won’t I?”

Thinking of Hermes and his winged sandals gave her an idea. Back to the

high-rent district of Mount Olympus she went. The god raised his eyebrows. He had a winged cap, too, one that fluttered off his head in surprise. “You want my shoes?” he said.

“I can’t very well walk across the Adriatic,” Andromeda said.

“No, that’s a different myth altogether,” Hermes agreed.

“And then up to Rome, to see if the gods are in,” Andromeda went on.

“They won’t be, not when the mercury rises,” Hermes said, “They’ll be out in the country, or else at the beach. Pompeii is very pretty this time of year.”

“Such a lovely view of the volcano,” Andromeda murmured. She cast Hermes a melting look. “May I please borrow your sandals?”

“Oh, all right,” he said crossly. “The story would bog down if I told you no at this point.”

“You’d better not be reading ahead,” Andromeda warned him. Hermes just snickered. Gods had more powers than mortals, and that was all there was to it. When Andromeda put on the winged sandals and hopped into the air, she stayed up. “Gotta be the shoes,” she said.

“Oh, it is,” Hermes assured her. “Have fun in Italy.”

As she started to fly away, Andromeda called back, “Do you know what Victoria’s secret is?”

The god dipped his head to show he did. “Good camera angles,” he replied.

Good camera angles. A quiet hostel. A nice view of the beach. And, dammit, a lovely view of the volcano, too. Vesuvius was picturesque. And so were Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra, dressed in lacy, colorful, overpriced wisps of not very much. As soon as Andromeda set eyes on them, she started hoping the mountain would blow up and bury those three in lava. Molten lava. Red-hot molten lava. The rest of Pompeii? So what? Herculaneum? So what? Naples, up the coast? Who needed it, really?

But Vesuvius stayed quiet. Of course it did. Hephaestus or Vulcan or whatever name he checked into motels with locally was probably up at the top of the spectacular cone, peering down, leering down, at some other spectacular cones. “Men,” Andromeda muttered. No wonder they’d given her this job. And they wouldn’t thank her for it once she did it, either.

As Andromeda flew down toward the Gorgons with the spectacularly un-Hellenic names, Victoria flew up to meet her, saying, “Whoever you are, go away. We’re just about to shoot.”

Shooting struck Andromeda as altogether too good for them. “Some victory you’re the goddess of,” she sneered, “unless you mean the one in Lysistrata.”

“You’re just jealous because you can’t cut the liquamen, sweetheart,” Victoria retorted.

Andromeda smiled a hemlock-filled smile. “Doesn’t matter whether I am or not,” she answered. “I’m on assignment from Zeus and Hera, so you can go take a flying leap at Selene.”

“Uppity mortal! You can’t talk to me like that.” Victoria drew back a suddenly very brawny right arm for a haymaker that would have knocked the feathers right off of Hermes’ sandals.

“Oh, yes, I can,” Andromeda said, and held up the shield Hera had given her.

She didn’t know whether it could have done a decent job of stopping the goddess’ fist. That didn’t matter. Victoria took one brief look at her reflection and cried, “Vae! Malae comae! Vae!” She fled so fast, she might have gone into business with her Greek cousin Nike.

A grim smile on her face, Andromeda descended on Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra. They were lined up on the beach like three tenpins—except not so heavy in the bottom, Andromeda thought resentfully. Had they been lined up any better, she’d have bet she could’ve looked into the left ear of the one on the left and seen out the right ear of the one on the right.

They turned on her in unison when she alighted on the sand. “Ooh, I like those sandals,” one of them crooned fiercely. “Gucci? Louis Vuitton?”

“No, Hermes’,” Andromeda answered. She fought panic as they advanced on her, swaying with menace—or something.

“I wonder what she’s doing here,” one of the Gorgons said. She waved at the gorgeous scenery, of which she and her comrades were the most gorgeous parts. “I mean, she’s so plain.”

“Mousy,” agreed another.

“Nondescript. Utterly nondescript,” said the third, proving she did have room in her head for a three-syllable word: two of them, even.

And the words flayed like fire. Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra weren’t even contemptuous. It was as if Andromeda didn’t rate contempt. That was their power; just by existing, they made everyone around them feel inadequate. Zeus wanted me, Andromeda thought, trying to stay strong. But what did that prove? Zeus wanted anything that moved, and, if it didn’t move, he’d give it an experimental shake.

Andromeda felt like curling up on the beach and dying right there. If she put the shield up over her, maybe it would keep her from hearing any more of the Gorgons’ cruel words. The shield . . . !

With a fierce cry of her own, Andromeda held it up to them. Instead of continuing their sinuous advance, they fell back with cries of horror. Peering down over the edge of the shield, Andromeda got a quick glimpse of their reflections. The shield had given her and Victoria bad hair. It was far more pitiless to Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra, perhaps because they had further to fall from the heights of haute couture. Whatever the reason, the three Gorgons’ hair might as well have turned to snakes once the shield had its way with them.

“Plain,” Andromeda murmured. “Mousy. Nondescript. Utterly nondescript.”

How the Gorgons howled! They fell to their knees in the sand and bowed their heads, trying to drive out those images of imperfection.

Still holding the shield on high, Andromeda drew her sword. She could have taken their heads at a stroke, but something stayed her hand. It wasn’t quite mercy: more the reflection that they’d probably already given a good deal of head to get where they were.

Roughly, she said, “Stay away from Olympus from now on, if you know what’s good for you. You ever come near there again, worse’ll be waiting for you.” She didn’t know if that was true, but it would be if Hera could make it so.

“But where shall we go?” one of them asked in a small, broken voice. “What shall we do?”

“Try Sports Illustrated,” Andromeda suggested, “though gods only know what sport you’d be illustrating.”

“Been there,” one said. Andromeda had no idea which was which, and didn’t care to find out. The other two chorused, “Done that.”

“Find something else, then,” Andromeda said impatiently. “I don’t care what, as long as it’s not in Zeus’ back yard.” And mine, she thought. Thinking that, she started to turn the terrible shield on them again and added, “Or else.”

Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra cringed. If they weren’t convinced now, they never would be, Andromeda judged. She jumped into the air and flew off. That way, she didn’t have to look at them any more, didn’t have to be reminded that they didn’t really look the way Hera’s shield made them seem to. Plain. Mousy. Nondescript. Utterly nondescript. Her hand went to the hilt of the sword. Maybe I should have done a little slaughtering after all. But she kept flying.

She took the scenic route home—after all, when would she be able to talk Hermes out of his sandals again? She saw Scylla and Charybdis, there by the toe of the Italian boot, and they were as horrible as advertised. She flew over the Pyramids of Egypt. Next door, the Sphinx tried his riddle on her. “Oh, everybody knows that one,” Andromeda said, and listened to him gnash his stone teeth.

She admired the lighthouse at Alexandria. It would be very impressive when they got around to building it—and when there was an Alexandria. Then she started north across the wine-dark sea toward Greece.

When she got to the coast near Argos, she saw a naked man chained to the rocks just above the waves. He was a lot more interesting than anything else she’d seen for a while—and the closer she got, the more interesting he looked. By the time she was hovering a few feet in front of him, he looked mighty damn fine indeed, you betcha. “I know it’s the obvious question,” she said, “but what are you doing here?”

“Waiting to be eaten,” he answered.

“Listen, garbagemouth, has it occurred to you that if I slap you silly, you can’t do thing one about it?” Andromeda said indignantly. “Has it?”

“No, by a sea serpent,” he explained.

“Oh. Well, no accounting for taste, I suppose,” she said, thinking of Pasiphaë and the bull. Then she realized he meant it literally. “How did that happen?” Another obvious question. “And who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Perseus,” he said. “My grandfather, Acrisius, is King of Argos. There’s a prophecy that if my mother had a son, he’d end up killing Gramps. So Mom was grounded for life, but Zeus visited her in a shower of gold, and here I am.”

“And on display, too,” Andromeda remarked. Zeus had been catching Hades from Hera ever since, too—Andromeda remembered the snide Mr. Shower-of-Gold. But that was neither here nor there, and Perseus was definitely here. “The sea serpent will take your granddad off the hook for doing you in?”

“You got it,” Perseus agreed.

“Ah . . . what about the chains? Doesn’t he think those might have something to do with him?”

Perseus shrugged. Andromeda admired pecs and abs. The chains clanked. “He’s not real long on ethics, Acrisius isn’t.”

“If you get loose, you’ll do your best to make the prophecy come true?” Andromeda asked.

Another shrug. More clanks. More admiration from Andromeda. Perseus said, “Well, I’ve sure got a motive now, and I didn’t before. But I’m not in a hurry about it. Omens have a way of working out, you know? I mean, would you be here to set me free if I weren’t fated to do Gramps in one of these years?”

“I’m not here to set you free,” Andromeda said. “I just stopped by for a minute to enjoy the scenery, and—”

Perseus pointed. He didn’t do it very well—he was chained, after all—but he managed. “Excuse me for interrupting,” he said, “but the sea serpent’s coming.”

Andromeda whirled in the air. “Eep!” she said. Perseus hadn’t been wrong. The monster was huge. It was fast. It was hideous. It was wet (which made sense, it being a sea serpent). It had an alarmingly big mouth full of a frighteningly large number of terrifyingly sharp teeth. Andromeda could have rearranged those adverbs any which way and they still would have added up to the same thing. Trouble. Big trouble.

She could also have flown away. She glanced back at Perseus and shook her head. That would have been a waste of a great natural resource. And, no matter what Hera had to say about it, Zeus wouldn’t be overjoyed if she left his bastard son out for sea-serpent fast food.

She drew her sword—Zeus’ sword—and flew toward the monster. One way or another, this story was going to get some blood in it. Or maybe not. She held up Hera’s mirrored shield, right in the sea serpent’s face. It might figure it was having a bad scales day and go away.

But no such luck. Maybe the shield didn’t work because the sea serpent had no hair. Maybe the serpent had already maxed out its ugly account. Or maybe it was too stupid to notice anything had changed. Andromeda shook her head again. If Cindy, Claudia, and Tyra had noticed, the sea serpent would have to.

No help for it. Sometimes, as Zeus had said, a sword was just a sword. Andromeda swung this one. It turned out to cut sea serpent a lot better than her very best kitchen knife cut roast goose. Chunk after reptilian chunk fell away from the main mass of the monster. The Aegean turned red. The sea serpent really might have been dumber than the Gorgons, because it took a very long time to realize it was dead. Eventually, though, enough of the head end was missing that it forgot to go on living and sank beneath the waves. If the sharks and the dolphins didn’t have a food fight with the scraps, they missed a hell of a chance.

Chlamys soaked with seawater and sea-serpent gore, Andromeda flew back toward Perseus. “I would applaud,” he said, “but under the circumstances . . .” He rattled his chains to show what he meant. “That was very exciting.”

Andromeda looked him over. He meant it literally. She could tell. She giggled. Greek statues always underestimated things. Quite a bit, here. She giggled again. Sometimes a sword wasn’t just a sword.

She looked up toward the top of the rocks. Nobody was watching; maybe Acrisius’ conscience, however vestigial, bothered him too much for that. She could do whatever she pleased. Perseus couldn’t do anything about it, that was plain enough. Andromeda giggled once more. She flew a little lower and a lot closer.

Perseus gasped. Andromeda pulled back a bit and glanced up at him, eyes full of mischief. “You said you were here to be eaten,” she pointed out.

“By a sea serpent!”

“If you don’t think this is more fun . . .” Her shrug was petulant. But, when you got down to the bottom of things, what Perseus thought didn’t matter a bit. She went back to what she’d been doing. After a little while, she decided to do something else. She hiked up the clammy chlamys and did it. Though she hadn’t suspected it till now, there were times when the general draftiness of Greek clothes and lack of an underwear department at the Athens K-Mart came in kind of handy. Up against the side of a cliff, winged sandals didn’t hurt, either. A good time was had by all.

Afterwards, still panting, Perseus said, “Now that you’ve ravished me, you realize you’ll have to marry me.”

Andromeda stretched languorously. A very good time had been had by all, or at least by her. She wished for a cigarette, and wished even more she knew what one was. “That can probably be arranged,” she purred.

“First, though, you’ll have to get me off,” Perseus said.

She squawked. “Listen, mister, if I didn’t just take care of that—”

“No, off this cliff,” he said.

“Oh.” Andromeda dipped her head in agreement. “Well, that can probably be arranged, too.” She drew the sword again and swung it. It sheared through the metal that imprisoned Perseus like a divine sword cutting cheap bronze chains. After four strokes—considerably fewer than he’d been good for—he fell forward and down. They caught each other in midair. Hermes’ sandals were strong enough to carry two. Andromeda had figured they would be. She and Perseus rose together.

After topping the rocks, they flew north toward Argos. Perseus said, “Can I borrow your sword for a minute?”

“Why?” Andromeda looked at him sidelong. “I like the one you come equipped with.”

“It won’t cut through the manacles on my ankles and wrists,” Perseus said.

“Hmm. I suppose not. Sure, go ahead.”

Divine swords had a lot going for them. This one neatly removed the manacles without removing the hands and feet they’d been binding. Thinking about all the times she’d sliced herself carving wild boar—those visiting Gauls could really put it away—Andromeda wished she owned cutlery like that.

Perseus said, “Can you steer a little more to the left?”

“Sure,” Andromeda said, and did. “How come?”

“That’s Acrisius’ palace down there.” Perseus pointed. “Who knows? Maybe I can make a prophecy come true.” He dropped the manacles and the lengths of chain attached to them, one after another. He and Andromeda both watched them fall.

“I can’t tell,” Andromeda said at last.

“Neither can I.” Perseus made the best of things: “If I did nail the old geezer, Matt Drudge’ll have it online before we get to Olympus.”

The wedding was the event of the eon. Andromeda’s mother and father, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, flew up from their Ethiopian home in their private Constellation. Acrisius’ cranium apparently remained undented, but nobody sent him an invitation. Danaë, Perseus’ mother, did come. She and Hera spent the first part of the weekend snubbing each other.

Zeus dishonored two maids of honor and, once in his cups, seemed convinced every cupbearer was named Ganymede. After he got into the second maid of honor, he also got into a screaming row with Hera. A couple of thunderbolts flew, but the wedding pavilion, though scorched, survived.

Hera and Danaë went off in a corner, had a good cry together, and were the best of friends from then on out. A little later, Zeus sidled up to Andromeda and asked in an anxious voice, “What is this First Wives’ Club my wife keeps talking about? Do you suppose it is as powerful as my sword?”

“Which one, your Godship, sir?” she returned; she was in her cups, too. Zeus didn’t answer, but went off with stormy, and even rather rainy, brow. Before long, he and Hera were screaming at each other again.

And then Andromeda and Perseus were off for their wedding night at the Mount Olympus Holiday Inn. In her cups or not, Andromeda didn’t like the way the limo driver handled the horses. Perseus patted her knee. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” he said. “Phaëthon hasn’t burned rubber, or anything else, for quite a while now.”

She might have argued more, but Perseus’ hand, instead of stopping at the knee, kept wandering north. And, with all the gods in the wedding party following the limo, odds were somebody could bring her back to life even if she did get killed.

Ambrosia—Dom Perignon ambrosia, no less—waited on ice in the honeymoon suite. The bed was as big as Boeotia, as soft as the sea-foam that spawned Aphrodite. Out in the hallway, the gods and demigods and mortals with pull who’d been at the wedding made a deityawful racket, waiting for the moment of truth.

They didn’t have to wait very long. Perseus was standing at attention even when he lay down on that inviting bed. Wearing nothing but a smile, Andromeda got down beside him. At the appropriate time, she let out a squeal, pretending to be a maiden. Everybody in the hallway let out a cheer, pretending to believe her.

After the honeymoon, things went pretty well. Perseus landed an editorial job at Argosy. Andromeda spent a while on the talk-show circuit: Loves Fated to Happen were hot that millennium. They bought themselves a little house. It was Greek Colonial architecture, right out of Grant Xylum, and they furnished it to match.

When Andromeda sat down on the four-poster bed one night, she heard a peculiar sound, not one it usually made. “What’s that?” she asked Perseus.

“What’s what?” he said, elaborately casual.

“That noise. Like—metal?”

“Oh. That.” Elaborately casual, all right—too elaborately casual. Perseus’ face wore an odd smile, half sheepish, half . . . something else. “It’s probably these.” He lifted up his pillow.

“Chains!” Andromeda exclaimed. “Haven’t you had enough of chains?”

“Well—sort of.” Perseus sounded sheepish, too, sheepish and . . . something else. An eager something else. “But it was so much fun that first time, I, I . . . thought we might try it again.”

“Did you?” Andromeda rubbed her chin. You don’t find out everything right away about the person you marry, especially if it’s a whirlwind courtship. Gods knew she hadn’t expected this. Still . . . “Why not?” she said at last. “Just don’t invite that damn sea serpent.”

And a good time was had by all.

Aside from teaching high school English, Steven Piziks also teaches sex education. He assures me that this has nothing to do with the following story. Right. He also plays the folk harp and vanishes into the woods for hours on end. Coincidence? Check out his novels In the Company of Mind and Corporate Mentality.

Chain, Link, Fence

Steven Piziks

“What,” the fence asked, “am I supposed to do with that?”

Kordel would have ground her teeth, but her jaws were already aching. “Buy it,” she said evenly.

The fence merely snorted.

Kordel flared her nostrils and shot a glance at the statue on the table between them. The silver figure of a man about ten inches high was chained to a miniature table with gem-encrusted bonds. One improbably proportioned part of the man’s anatomy speared skyward. His head was thrown back in what was either a shudder of ecstacy or a grimace of agony. Since he was alone on the table and his hands were chained down, Kordel rather imagined it was the latter.

“What’ll you give me for it?” Kordel said through still-clenched teeth.

The fence barked a short laugh that echoed slightly about the spartan white walls of his seemingly empty shop; a wise fence kept his merchandise out of sight. Two heavy velvet curtains obscured the back room while a single window threw a hard square of light on the stone floor.

“Look, Kordel,” the fence said, ignoring Kordel’s glare, “you stole the statue of Sybaritus from the temple downtown. Very nice. A feather in your cap, and all that.”

“Any temple with a back door deserves to be burgled,” Kordel muttered.

“But,” the fence continued, waggling a thin, bony finger, “this piece is . . . unique. If word gets out I have it, I’m going to have a bunch of murder-minded cultists on my hands.” He steepled his fingertips. “Why don’t you try pulling out the gems and melting it down?”

“I thought of that four fences ago,” Kordel snapped. “But the thing isn’t pure silver—only gilded. And the gems are barely semi-precious.”

“Figures,” the fence snorted. “A fake statue for a false god.” He picked idly at the gilding, then noticed which part he was picking at and quickly dropped his hand. “I’ve never understood the Sybarites. Marks, all of them. They ‘contribute’ huge sums of money for a ritual orgy when they could get the same thing up the street for one-third the cost—and that without boring mumbo-jumbo to a god Anya Nightbond created for her own profit.” He clucked his tongue. “I don’t understand the attraction.”

Kordel shrugged. “They think that sex with the presence of the god—drawn down into the statue—is better than without it. They also believe that without a weekly ritual, they’ll become unable to have sex at all. Since they believe it’s true, it becomes true. And Anya cashes in on their belief.”

The fence lifted an eyebrow. “How do you know all this?”

“I attended their rituals,” Kordel replied matter-of-factly. “Part of casing the job.”

The fence gave her a sidelong glance and opened his mouth to ask a question.

“I wouldn’t,” Kordel warned. “I’m already in a bad mood.”

The fence cocked his head, considering pro and con. Con carried the day. He picked up the statue instead and hefted it. “Whatever possessed you to steal this thing, anyway? You must have known it’s a piece of junk.”

“I made a bet.”

“A bet?”

“I bet I could steal the statue of Sybaritus and make at least a hundred silver from it.”

The fence snorted again. “I hope your stake wasn’t valuable.”

Kordel licked her lips and glanced away, fixing her gaze on the velvet curtains. “If I lose,” she said quietly, “I have to turn myself over to the city guard.”

“Uh-oh. Who did you bet with?”

“Bernard of Marthia. He bet his family jewel.”

The fence made a face. “Old B.M.? What did he do? Trick you into drinking whisky?”

Kordel remained silent.

“Well,” the fence said with resignation, “I think the city guard is going to be very happy in a couple days. And I’m going to lose a good client.”

“Look,” Kordel said desperately, “why don’t you give me a hundred for the statue and quietly drop it down a deep hole? I’ll pay you back later.”

The fence’s eyes went flat. “If it comes to that, why don’t you just leave town to avoid paying up?”

“I gave my word!” Kordel flared back. “There are principles involved here.”

The fence nodded. “Exactly. If anyone linked the sale to me, my career would be over. Sorry, Kordel. The statue is valuable only to the cult. You’ve lost.”

“You’re wrong!” Kordel angrily snatched up the statue, stuffed it into a large pouch—it made an interesting bulge—and strode for the door. “There must be someone in this city who’ll buy it.”

“Not a chance,” the fence called after her. “No one but the cult will touch the thing.”

Kordel halted. She stared for a long time at the door in front of her. “You think so?” she said without turning around. “No one but the cult?”

“No one,” he replied firmly.

Kordel grinned over her shoulder at him. “I think you’re right.” And she vanished into the street.

“What,” the fence asked, “am I supposed to do with that?”

“Buy it,” Kordel said gaily. “And stop sneering. It’s an act designed to bring my selling price down.”

The fence sighed and picked up the object, a large emerald this time. “What happened with your bet?”

Kordel grinned. “You’re fondling the prize.”

The fence looked up in surprise. “I’m holding Bernard’s family jewel?”

“It’s not a family jewel any longer,” Kordel said.

“Obviously,” the fence agreed, screwing a jeweler’s lens into one eye and peering at the emerald. “This gem is flawed. How did you win? I would have sworn no one would buy that statue.”

“Emeralds are always flawed,” Kordel replied smoothly. “And I didn’t sell the statue.”

“You didn’t?” Again the fence looked up in surprise, but the effect was rather ruined by the jeweler’s lens. “Then how did you make a profit?”

Kordel leaned against the table. “Do you have any idea,” she drawled, “how much money you can make holding a god for ransom?”

The fence thought about that, then laughed aloud.

“Nightbond tried to bargain with me, if you can believe it,” Kordel continued. “But I told her if she didn’t give me a thousand silver, I’d send her a pile of slag and her profitable little rituals would come to an end. I had her god by the—”

“I see, I see,” the fence interrupted. “Now about this emerald . . .”

A sultry voice wafted into the shop as the fence peered out the window. “Is she gone?”

“She’s gone,” he replied.

The curtains to the back room rustled aside and a dark-haired woman slipped unctuously into the shop. A mail overlay clinked against her black leather corset, and a small cat o’ nine tails rustled at her belt. “The emerald, please,” she said, unfolding her hand.

The fence took up his customary place behind the table. “First my fee.”

“Of course.” Anya Nightbond reached into a black leather pouch and stacked several silver coins on the table with fluid grace. “Two hundred for the emerald and two hundred for your trouble.”

“I like doing business with the clergy,” the fence remarked as he dropped the emerald into Anya’s supple hand. “Especially the wealthy clergy. Who’s next?”

Anya toyed thoughtfully with the gem. “Gilroy the Smuggler takes dares if he smokes enough seer’s weed. I’ll give a bundle to Bernard of Marthia when I return the betting emerald to him.”

The fence nodded. “Just out of curiosity,” he asked, “Kordel demanded a thousand silver from you for the statue. How much did you tell your congregation she wanted?”

“How much would you pay to rescue your sex life?” Anya purred. Then she sauntered out the door.

Elizabeth Moon is a beautiful, brilliant, and incredibly talented SF writer (In My Humble Opinion) but she’d rather be rich. Her most recent book is Rules of Engagement. She lives in Texas with her husband, son, cat and horse. She’s supposed to be hard at work on her next book, but I’m glad she took the time to give us this story.

Fool’s Gold

Elizabeth Moon

“It’s been done to death,” Mirabel Stonefist said.

“It’s traditional.” Her sister Monica sat primly upright, embroidering tiny poppies on a pillowcase. All Monica’s pillow-cases had poppies on them, just as all the curtains on the morning side of the house had morning glories.

“Traditional is another word for ‘done to death,’ ” Mirabel said. Her own pillow-cases had a stamped sigil and the words property of the royal barracks do not remove.

“It’s unlucky to break with tradition.”

“It’s unlucky to have anything to do with dragons,” Mirabel said, rubbing the burn scar on her left leg.

Cavernous Dire had never intended to be a dragon. He had intended to be a miser, living a long and peaceful life of solitary selfishness near the Tanglefoot Mountains, but he had, all unwitting, consumed a seed of dragonsfoot which had been—entirely by accident—baked into a gooseberry tart. That wouldn’t have changed him, if his neighbor hadn’t made an innocent mistake and handed him dragonstongue, instead of dragonsbane, to ease a sore tongue. The two plants do look much alike, and usually it makes no difference whether you nibble a leaf of D. abscondus or D. lingula, since both will ease a cold-blister, but in those rare instances when someone has an undigested seed of dragonsfoot in his gut, and then adds to it the potent essence of D. lingula . . . well.

Of course it was all a mistake, and an accident, and the fact that when Cavernous went back to the village to dig his miser’s hoard out from under the hearthstone it was already gone meant nothing. Probably. And most likely the jar of smelly ointment that broke on his scaly head—fixing him in his draconic form until an exceedingly unlikely conjunction of events—was an accident too, though Goody Chernoff’s cackle wasn’t.

So Cavernous Dire sloped off to the Tanglefoots in a draconish temper, scorching fenceposts along the way. He found a proper cave, and would have amassed a hoard from the passing travelers, if there’d been any. But his cave was a long way from any pass over the mountains, and he was far too prudent to tangle with the rich and powerful dragons whose caves lay on more lucrative trade routes.

He was forced to prey on the locals.

At first, sad to say, this gave him wicked satisfaction. They’d robbed him. They’d turned him into a dragon and robbed him, and—like a true miser—he minded the latter much more than the former. He ate their sheep, and then their cattle (having grown large enough), and once inhaled an entire flock of geese—a mistake, he discovered, as burning feathers stank abominably. He could not quite bring himself to eat their children, though his draconish nature found them appetizing, because he knew too well how dirty they really were, and how disgusting the amulets their mothers tied round their filthy necks. But he did kill a few of the adults, when they marched out with torches to test the strength of his fire. He couldn’t stomach their stringy, bitter flesh.

Finally they moved away, cursing each other for fools, and Cavernous reigned over a ruined district. He pried up every hearthstone, and rooted in every well, but few were the coins or baubles which the villagers left behind.

Although the ignorant assert that the man-drake has powers greater than the dragonborn, this is but wishful thinking. Dragons born from the egg inherit all the ancient wisdom and power of dragonkind. Man-drakes are but feeble imitations, capable of matching true dragons only in their lust for gold. So poor Cavernous Dire, though fearsome to men, had not a chance of surviving in any contest with real dragons—and real dragons find few things so amusing as tormenting man-drakes.

’Tis said that every man has some woman who loves him—at least until she dies of his misuse—and so it was with Cavernous. Though most of the children born into his very dysfunctional birth-family had died of abuse or neglect, he had a sister, Bilious Dire, who had not died, but lived—and lived, moreover, with the twisted memory that Cavernous had once saved her life. (In fact, he had merely pushed her out of his way on one of the many occasions when his mother Savage came after him with a hot ladle.) But Bilious built her life, as do we all, on the foundation of her beliefs about reality, and in her reality Cavernous was a noble being.

She had been long away, Bilious, enriching the man who owned her, but at last she grew too wrinkled and stiff, and he cast her out. So she returned to the foothills village of her childhood, to find it ruined and empty, with dragon tracks in the street.

“That horrible dragon,” she wailed at the weeping sky. “It’s stolen my poor innocent brother. I must find help—”

“So you see, it’s the traditional quest to rescue the innocent victim of a dragon,” Mirabel’s sister said. “Our sewing circle has taken on the rehabilitation of the faded blossoms of vice—” Mirabel mimed gagging, and her sister glared at her. “Don’t laugh! It’s not funny—the poor things—”

“Isn’t there Madam Aspersia’s Residence for them?”

“Madam Aspersia only has room for twenty, and besides she gives preference to women of a Certain Kind.” Mirabel rolled her eyes; her sister combined the desire to talk about Such Things with the inability to name the Things she wanted to talk about.

“Well, but surely there are other resources—”

“In this city perhaps, but in the provinces—” Before Mirabel could ask why the provinces should concern the goodwives of Weeping Willow Street, her sister took a deep breath and plunged on. “So when poor Bilious—obviously past any chance of earning a living That Way—begged us to find help for her poor virgin brother taken by a dragon, of course I thought of you.”

“Of course.”

“Surely your organization does something to help women—that is its name, after all, Ladies’ Aid and Armor Society. . . .”

Mirabel had tried to explain, on previous occasions, what the LAAS had been founded for, and why it would not help with a campaign to provide each orphaned girl with hand-embroidered underclothes for her trousseau, or stand shoulder to shoulder with the Weeping Willow Sewing Society’s members when they marched on taverns that sold liquor to single women. (Didn’t her sister realize that all the women in the King’s Guard hung out in taverns? Or was that the point?)

Now, through clenched teeth, Mirabel tried once more. “Monica—we do help women—each other. We were founded as a mutual-aid society for all women soldiers, though we do what we can—” The LAAS charity ball, for instance, supported the education of the orphaned daughters of soldiers.

“Helping each other is just like helping yourself, and helping yourself is selfish. Here’s this poor woman, with no hope of getting her brother free if you don’t do something—”

Mirabel felt her resistance crumbling, as it usually did if her sister talked long enough.

“I don’t see how he can be a virgin, if he’s older than his sister,” she said. A weak argument, and she knew it. So did Monica.

“You can at least investigate, can’t you? It can’t hurt . . .”

It could get her killed, but that was a remote danger. Her sister was right here and now. “No promises,” Mirabel said.

“I knew you’d come through,” said Monica.

As Mirabel Stonefist trudged glumly across a lumpy wet moor, she thought she should have chosen “stonehead” for her fighting surname instead of “stonefist.” She’d broken fingers often enough to disprove the truth of her chosen epithet, and over a moderately long career more than one person had commented on her personality in granitic terms. Stonehead, bonehead, too stubborn to quit and too dumb to figure a way out . . .

She had passed three abandoned, ruined villages already, the thatched roofs long since rotted, a few tumbled stone walls blacked by fire. She’d found hearthstones standing on end like grave markers, and not one coin of any metal.

And she’d found dragon tracks. Not, to someone who had been in the unfortunate expedition to kill the Grand Dragon Karshnak of Kreshnivok, very big dragon tracks, but big enough to trip over and fall splat in. It had been raining for days, as usual in autumn, and the dragon tracks were all full of very cold water.

Her biggest mistake, she thought, had been birth order. If she’d been born after Gervais, she’d have been the cute little baby sister, and no one would ever have called on her to solve problems for the family. But as the oldest—the big sister to them all—she’d been cast as family protector and family servant from the beginning.

And her next biggest mistake, at least in the present instance, had been telling the Ladies’ Aid and Armor Society that she was just going to check on things. With that excuse, no one else could find the time to come with her, so here she was, trudging across a cold, wet slope by herself, in dragon country.

They must really hate her. They must be slapping each other on the back, back home, and bragging on how they’d gotten rid of her. They must—

“Dammit, ’Bel, wait up!” The wind had dropped from its usual mournful moan, and she heard the thin scream from behind. She whirled. There—a long way back and below—an arm waved vigorously. She blinked. As if a dragon-laid spell of misery had been lifted, her mood rose. Heads bobbed among the wet heather. Two—three? She wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t alone anymore, and she felt almost as warm as if she were leaning on a wall in the palace courtyard in the sun.

They were, of course, grumbling when they came within earshot. “Should’ve called yourself Mirabel Longlegs—” Siobhan Bladehawk said. “Don’t you ever sleep at night? We were beginning to think we’d never catch up.”

“And why’d you go off in that snit?” asked Krystal, flipping the beaded fringe on her vest. “See this? I lost three strings, two of them with real lapis beads, trying to track you through that white-thorn thicket. You could just as easily have gone around it, rather than making me get my knees all scratched—”

“Shut up, Krystal,” Siobhan said. “Though she has a point, ’Bel. What got into you, anyway?”

Mirabel sniffed, and hated herself for it. “Bella said if I was just investigating, I could go alone—nobody should bother—”

“Bella’s having hot flashes,” Siobhan said. “Not herself these days, our Bella, and worried about having to retire. We unelected her right after you left, and then we came after you. If you had just waited a day, ’stead of storming out like that—”

“But you’re so impetuous,” Krystal said, pouting. She pulled the end of her silver-gilt braid around, frowned at it, and nipped off a split end with her small, white, even teeth.

The third member of the party appeared, along with a shaggy pack pony, its harness hung with a startling number of brightly polished horse brasses.

“I needed a holiday,” Sophora said, her massive frame dwarfing everything but the mountains. “And a chance for some healthy open-air exercise.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer grinned. “Besides, I think that idiot Balon of Torm is trying to rob the realm, and this will give him a chance, he thinks. The fool.”

Mirabel’s mood now suited a sunny May morning. Not even the next squall off the mountain could make her miserable. Krystal, though, turned her back to the blowing rain and pouted again.

“This is ruining my fringes.”

“Shut up Krystal,” said everyone casually. The world was back to normal.

Cavernous Dire had subsisted on rockrats, rock squirrels, rock grouse, and the occasional rock (mild serpentine, with streaks of copper sulfate, eased his draconic fire-vats, he’d found). In midwinter, he might be lucky enough to flame a mountain goat before it got away, or even a murk ox (once widespread, now confined to a few foggy mountain valleys) . But autumn meant hunger, unless he traveled far into the plains, where he could be hunted by man and dragon alike.

Now, as he lay on the cold stone floor of his cave, stirring the meagre pile of his treasure, he scented something new, something approaching from the high, cold peaks of the Tanglefoots. He sniffed. Not a mountain goat. Not a murk ox (and besides, it wasn’t foggy enough for the murk ox to be abroad). A sharp, hot smell, rather like the smell of his own fire on rock.

Like many basically unattractive men, Cavernous Dire had been convinced of his own good looks, back when he was a young lad who coated his hair with woolfat, and had remained convinced that he had turned his back on considerable female attention when he chose to become a miser. So, when he realized that the unfamiliar aroma wafting down the cold wet wind was another dragon, his first thought was “Of course.” A she-dragon had been attracted by his elegance, and hoped to make up to him.

Quickly, he shoved his treasure to the back of the cave, and piled rocks on it. No thieving, lustful she-dragon was going to get his treasure, though he had to admit it was pleasant to find that the girls still pursued him. He edged to the front of his cave and looked upwind, into the swirls of rain. There—was she there? Or—over there?

The women of the expedition set up camp with the swift, capable movements of those experienced in such things. The tent blew over only once, and proved large enough for them all, plus Dumpling the pony, over whose steaming coat Siobhan labored until she was as wet as it had been, and so were half their blankets. Then she polished the horse brasses on Dumpling’s harness; she had insisted that any horse under her care would be properly adorned and she knew the others wouldn’t bother. Meanwhile, the others built a fire and cooked their usual hearty fare, under cover of the front flap.

They were all sitting relaxed around the fire, full of mutton stew and trail bread, sipping the contents of the stoneware jug Sophora had brought, when they heard a shriek. It sounded like someone falling off a very high cliff, and unhappy about it.

Scientific experimentation has shown that it is impossible to put on breastplate, gorget, helm, greaves, armlets, and gauntlets in less than one minute, and thus some magical power must have aided the warrior women, for they were all outside the tent, properly armored, armed, and ready for inspection when the dragon fell out of the sky and squashed the tent flat.

“Dumpling!” cried Siobhan, and lunged for the tent as the pony squealed and a series of thumps suggested that hind hooves were in use.

“No, wait—” Mirabel grabbed her. Siobhan, doughty warrior that she was, had one weakness: an intemperate concern for the welfare of horseflesh. “You can hear he’s alive.”

“Ssss. . . .” A warm glow, as of live coals being revived, appeared in the gloom where the tent had been. Dumpling squealed again. Something ripped, and hoofbeats receded into the distance. “Ahhh . . . sss . . .”

“A dragon fell on our tent,” Mirabel said, with the supernatural calm of the truly sloshed. “And it’s alive. And we’re out here in the dark—”

Light flared out of the sky; when she looked up, there was a huge shape, like a dragon made all of fire. It was about the color of a live scorpion, she thought wildly, as it grew larger and larger. . . .

“That one’s bigger,” Sophora said, in her sweet soprano. “At least it’s not dark any more.”

Mirabel had never noticed that dragons could direct their fire, in much the way that the watch commander could direct the light of his candle lantern. Silver threads of falling rain . . . a widening cone of light . . . and in the middle of it, their flattened tent held down by a lumpish dragon the color of drying slime along the edge of a pond. Its eyes—pale, oyster-colored eyes—opened, and its gray-lipped mouth gaped. Steam curled into the air.

“Is it a baby?” asked Siobhan. Then she, like the others, looked again at the expression in those eyes. “No,” she said, answering her own question. Even Siobhan, whose belief that animals were never vicious until humans made them so had survived two years in the King’s Cavalry, knew nastiness when she saw it.

“It’s hovering,” Sophora said, pointing upward. Sure enough, the bigger dragon, now only a bowshot above, had stopped its descent and was balancing on the wind. Its gaping mouth, still pointed downward, gave fiery light to the scene, but its body no longer glowed. Sophora waved her sword at the big dragon. “This one’s ours,” she shouted. “Go away, or—”

The dragon laughed. The blast of hot air that rolled over them smelt of furnaces and smiths’ shops, and deserts—but it did not fry them. It laughed, they knew it laughed; that was enough for the moment, and the great creature rose into the dark night, removing its light and leaving them once more in darkness.

With a live and uncooperative dragon on their flattened tent.

“We haven’t seen the last of that one,” Sophora said.

“My best jerkin is probably getting squashed into the mud,” said Krystal.

“Shut up, Krystal,” they all said. All but the dragon.

Cavernous Dire had never seen a dragon before he became one, and thus had only the vaguest idea what they were supposed to look like. Big, of course, and scaly, and breathing fire from a long, toothy mouth. Long tail with spikes on it. Legs, naturally, or dragons would be just fire-breathing snakes. If he’d known that dragons have wings, he’d forgotten it after he became a dragon, and his own wings were, like those of all man-drakes, pitiful little stubs on the shoulders, hardly more than ruffles of dry itchy skin.

So when the real dragon swooped down the valley, he was amazed. She—he still thought, at this point, that the dragon was female—was an awe-inspiring sight, with the wide wings spanning the valley from side to side. She was so much bigger than he was. Crumbs of information about insects in which the male was much smaller than the female tried to coalesce and tell him something important, but he couldn’t quite think, in the presence of this great beast. Dragons have this effect on all humans, but it’s much stronger with man-drakes, and it amuses them to reduce their toys to mindlessness right before they reduce them to their constituent nutrient molecules.

The dragon flew past, and out of sight. Cavernous thrust his own long scaly neck out of his cave, trying to see where she’d gone. Nothing but wet rock, nothing but wet wind, nothing but curtains of fine rain stirred by her passage. She must be shy . . .

Strong talons seized his neck and plucked him from his cave as a robin plucks out a worm from the ground. The wings boomed on either side of him, and boomed again, and he was rising upward so fast that he felt the blood rushing to his dependent tail.

It is not for Men to know, or Bards to tell, what true dragons do to man-drakes in the high halls of the air, but it took several hours, during which time Cavernous realized how little he knew about dragon anatomy, his own or that of others, and how little he liked what he was learning now. Night had fallen by then, and soon he had fallen—was falling—and the glowing beast beside him rumbled warm laughter all the way down to the base of the clouds, then let him fall away into the wet night.

He didn’t remember hitting the ground, but waking up was terrible. Darkness, cold, rain pelting his hide, and more pain than he had ever imagined inside him. His fire-vats had slopped over, burning other internal parts he hadn’t known he possessed. Since it is the nature of dragons of all kinds to heal with unnatural speed, his broken bones were already knitting, but they hurt as they knit. Something was hitting him repeatedly, hard punches to the nasal arch, and squealing in his lower ear. He tried to draw in a breath, which hurt, and finally whatever it was quit hitting him and ran away. It was a long moment before he realized it had been a horse.

Light stabbed through his third eyelid, and he smelt the big dragon hovering above him. If he could have thought, he would have begged for mercy. Then darkness returned, and he closed his eye again, hoping that he’d wake up in his own cave and find it had all been a bad dream.

Experienced campaigners can light a fire in a howling wet gale, if sober and industrious. Those whose tents have been flattened by dragons, and whose last prior calories were derived from potent brew may have more problems.

Siobhan was off somewhere in the distance, calling Dumpling. It wouldn’t do any good to call her back; as long as she was fretting over the pony her brain wouldn’t work anyway. Krystal muttered on about her ruined wardrobe, but Mirabel heard Sophora give a gusty sigh.

“I supposed I’ll have to do something about that dragon,” she said. “And that means making a light—”

Experienced campaigners always have a few dry fire-starters in their packs, but the packs were inside the tent, underneath the dragon. Mirabel felt in her pockets and discovered nothing but a squashed sugared plum, left over from the Iron Jill Retreat some months back. Sophora had her Chancellor’s Seal, with the crystal which could double as a lens to start a fire from sunlight . . . but not in the middle of the night. Glumly, they huddled against the dragon and sank into a state of numb endurance familiar from past campaigns.

Morning arrived with a smear of light somewhere behind the Tanglefoot Mountains. Eventually the sodden expedition could make out the shape of the fallen dragon, still lying on their tent.

Compared to the Grand Dragon Karshnak, it was a small specimen, not much larger than the tent it had flattened. Its color in this cold gray light reminded Mirabel most of a mud turtle, a dull brownish green. It lay as it had fallen, in an untidy heap.

But it wasn’t dead. Even if thin curls of steam hadn’t been coming from its nostrils and partially open mouth, the slow undulation of its sides would have indicated life within. Siobhan, returning with the mud-streaked Dumpling, eyed the dragon suspiciously.

Dumpling whinnied. At that, the dragon opened one gelid eye. Its mouth gaped wider, and more steam poured out. It stirred, black talons scraping as its feet contracted.

“We ought to kill it now,” Siobhan said, soothing the jittery pony. “While we can.”

“No,” Krystal said. “If we kill it now, it’ll bleed on the tent, and there go all our clothes.”

“If we don’t kill it now, and it wakes up and kills us, what use will our clothes be?”

Recovery from the dragon-change induced by eating a dragonsfoot seed, and then a leaf of dragonstongue, and then being slathered with Goody Chernoff’s anti-wrinkle ointment (guaranteed to hold your present form until a certain conjunction of events) requires three unlikely things to happen within one day, as foretold in the Prophecies of Slart.

“Whanne thatte murke-ox be founde,

in sunlight lying on the grounde,

in autumn’s chill to gather heate,

and when the blonde beautie sweete,

her lippes pressed to colde flesh,

and also dragons’ song be herde,

then shalle the olde Man spring afresh,

and hearken to commandinge werde.”

If the warrior women had known that Cavernous Dire was the dragon, bespelled into that form, and if they had known of the Prophecies of Slart—but they didn’t. The Prophecies of Slart were only then being penned three kingdoms away by a young woman disguised as a young man, who had not been able to make a living as a songwriter.

Toying with the man-drake had been fun, but now the big dragon wanted meat. He could always go back and eat the man-drake—but if he did that, he’d be tempted to play with his food awhile longer, and his body wanted food now. He sniffed, a long indrawn sniff that dragged the prevailing winds from their courses.

Somewhere . . . ah, yes, murk ox. He sniffed again, long and low. It had been a long time—centuries, at least—since he’d eaten the last murk ox near his own lair. And he did like murk ox. Huge as he was, even one murk ox made a pleasant snack and a herd of them was a good solid meal, food for the recreation he rather thought he’d enjoy later.

The trick with murk ox was extracting them from the murk. They lived in narrow, steep-sided valleys too narrow for his great wings, where the fog lingered most of the day. The great dragon had learned, when much smaller, that flying into murk ox terrain, into the fog, led to bruised wings or worse. There were better ways—entertaining ways—to hunt murk ox.

The great dragon drew in another long, long breath and then blew.

For days a chill wet wind had blown down from the mountains. Now, in the space of a few minutes, it had shifted to the southwest, and then gone back to the northeast, then back to the southwest again. Back and forth, as if the sky itself were huffing in and out, unsure whether to take in air or let it out.

Then, with startling suddenness, the clouds began rolling up from the southwest, toward the mountains, the bottoms lifting higher and higher until the sun struck under them, glittering and sparkling on the drenched moorland. Higher still the clouds rose, blowing away eastward, and leaving a clear blue sky behind.

Mirabel squinted in the sudden bright gold light, but as far as she could see the land lay clear—wet but drying—in the sun, which struck warmer with every passing minute.

“It’s certainly a break from Court procedure,” Sophora said. “There every day’s much the same, but this—”

“What’s that?” asked Siobhan, pointing to a cleft in the mountains a few leagues distant. Little dark dots were moving quickly from what must be the entrance to a narrow mountain valley, out onto the moorland.

Sophora held up her Chancellor’s seal, centered with crystal, and put it to her eye. “I had our guild wizard apply a scrying spell,” she told the others. “Good heavens—I do believe—it’s a kapootle of murk ox.”

“Murk ox! But they never come out in the open. Certainly not the whole kapootle.”

“Not unless they’re chased,” Sophora said. “Look.” She pointed.

Mirabel recognized the flying shape without having to be told what it was. The big dragon, now gliding very slowly down the mountainside and aiming a stream of fire into the valley where the murk ox had been concealed until the clouds lifted.

Soon the last murk oxen had left the valley, but the great dragon seemed in no haste to snatch them. Instead, it floated low overhead, herding them closer and closer to the women and the smaller dragon. Then it dipped its head from the glide—not even swooping lower, they noticed, and snatched one murk ox from the herd. They could see it writhe . . . and then the lump sliding down the dragon’s long throat, just like an egg down a snake.

Another jet of flame, and the murk ox kapootle picked up speed, lumbering nearer—those splayed hooves now shaking the boggy heath.

“That dragon,” Mirabel said. “It’s herding them at us.”

“Oh, good,” Sophora said. “I was hoping for some fresh meat on this trip, and hunting’s been poor . . .”

“Not that much fresh meat,” Mirabel said. The heaving backs of many murk oxen could now be seen quite clearly, though the curious twisted horns could not be distinguished from the muck they were kicking up.

Although it is well known—or at least believed—that a herd of horses or cattle will divide around a group of standing humans rather than trample them, the murk ox kapootle has quite another reputation, which explains why it has not been hunted to extinction by men. No one knows what the murk ox thinks as it gallumphs along, but avoiding obstacles smaller than hills isn’t part of its cognitive processes. A kapootle of murk ox will trample all but the stoutest trees, and the mere human form goes down like straw before the reaper.

With the quick decision that characterizes the combat-experienced soldier, the warrior women bolted for the only cover available, that of the still-recumbent dragon on their collapsed tent. Siobhan dragged Dumpling along behind.

In moments, the lead murk ox overran their campsite. Emitting the strident squeaks of a murk ox in mortal fear, the lead ox galloped right over the dragon, digging him painfully in the snout and eye on the way up to his shoulder, and then staggering badly on the slippery scaled ribs, before running on down the declining tail. Only a few of his followers attempted the same feat, and all but one slid off the dragon’s ribs, there to be trampled by their fellows. That one, unable to match its leader’s surefooted leap down to the tail, launched itself right over the heads of the cowering warrior women, tripped on landing, and broke its neck.

“That was lucky!” shouted Mirabel over the piercing squeaks of the kapootle, now thundering past on either side.

“Yes,” Sophora agreed. “Quite plump—a nice dinner for us.” She started toward the twitching carcase, but a shadow loomed suddenly. They looked up. The great dragon lowered one foot and plucked the murk ox off the ground, meanwhile watching them with an expression which mingled challenge and amusement.

“You are a wicked beast,” Sophora said, undaunted. Mirabel remembered that Sophora had been undaunted even by the Grand Dragon Karshnak, at least until she’d been knocked unconscious by a wing blow.

The dragon winked, and popped the murk ox into its mouth. Flames licked around it; they could smell the reek of burning hair, and then the luscious smell of roasting meat. Then, with a boom and a whirl of air, the dragon was up and away, chasing laggard murk oxen on with a lick of flame, and crooning something that might have been meant for music.

“Well,” said Krystal, flicking dabs of muck off her vest. “Now that’s over, maybe we can do something about getting this mess off our tent, so I can find out what’s happened to my clothes.”

Cavernous Dire had slept uneasily, with cold rain trickling down his ribs and under his tail, but each time he’d roused, he’d managed to force himself back to sleep. It hurt less that way. When sunlight struck his eyes in the morning, he clenched his outer lids tight to block it out and hoped for the best. He could feel that his broken bones were mostly mended, and the internal burns were nearly healed as well. But he did not feel like coping with the real world.

He had, however, sneaked peeks at the humans in his immediate vicinity. Four women in bronze and leather, with swords and short hunting spears. Cavernous Dire had not enjoyed human meat when he tried it before, and three of the four warrior women looked unappetizing in any form. The fourth, though, he might have fancied in other situations. She had silvery blond hair, peach-blossom cheeks, a perky nose, teeth like pearls, and a ripely pouting mouth. Years of solitude as a dragon, with a meagre and uninteresting hoard to guard, had given him time to fantasize about women, and this woman met all his qualifications except that she was carrying a very sharp sword.

If he just lay there and pretended to sleep, maybe the women would go away. His draconic scales dulled his tactile awareness enough that he didn’t realize he was lying on their tent, and before he listened to enough of their conversation, he became aware of something else.

The ground was shivering. Then shuddering. Cavernous opened one eye just in time to see a dark hairy shape hurtling toward him, and snapped his eye shut. Sharp hard things hit the same tender parts of his snout which the horse had kicked in the dark, and then dented his scales on their way up his head, his shoulder, and along his ribs, where they tickled. And he could sense, with that infallible sense given to man-drakes, that somewhere in the sky the large dragon which had hurt him so badly was lurking, waiting for him to show life so he could be tormented again.

Better the tickle of murk ox hooves than the talons of a dragon. Cavernous hunkered down, feigning unconsciousness as best he could, as the kapootle squeaked and thundered past, though the moment when he sensed the great dragon close above him was almost impossible to bear. Then it was gone, and he dared open his outer eyelids again, just a tiny bit, to see what was going on.

“—And I say we butcher it now!” That was his diminuitive blonde, she of the perky nose and accouterments.

“You were the one who said it’d bleed on our gear,” the tallest one said. “Besides, Krystal, you really should be grateful to it. It saved our lives.”

“And if you say ‘What’s life without my embroidered nightshirt with the suede fringe?’ I will personally roll you through that squashed murk ox,” said the one with the crooked nose.

“I am grateful,” Krystal said, sounding very cross. “What do you want me to do, Mirabel, kiss it and make it well?”

“Don’t be silly,” said the one petting the very dirty pony, whose harness was adorned with gleaming gold shapes. For a moment all Cavernous could think of was the treasure wasted on that stupid pony. “We all know you wouldn’t kiss anything that ugly, no matter what it did for you.”

“You—you—”

“Like when Rusty the Armorer fixed that helm for you, and all you did was wave at him—”

“Well . . . he’s old. And he has only three teeth.”

The one named Mirabel grinned suddenly. “Come on, Krystal—I dare you. Kiss a dragon. Maybe it will cure it.”

“Eeeeuw!”

“Scaredy-cat.”

“Am not!”

“Just think, Krystal, how your . . . mmm . . . special friends will be impressed . . . if you do dare the dragon’s breath, that is. If you don’t—are they going to respect you, even if you do have that fancy mask?”

Krystal glared at them, shrugged, and twitched the twitchable parts of her anatomy. Then, with a pout the dragon was finding increasingly adorable, she shrugged. “All right. But only because I know you’ll make up some horrid story about me if I don’t. And not—not on the lips.”

She sauntered toward the dragon’s mouth. Cavernous had to roll his big man-drake eye down to watch her. She leaned over his snout, lips pursed.

From the man-drake’s point of view, the kiss was an explosion of sensation unlike anything he’d ever felt, and the strange feelings went on and on. No one had told him he could turn back into a man, so he hadn’t bothered trying to imagine what it would feel like. His eyes opened very wide, but all he could see was whirling colors.

From Mirabel’s point of view, Krystal put her lips to the dragon’s snout, and the dragon collapsed like a bagpipe’s bag, with a sort of warm whooshing noise, and almost simultaneously, the moor burst into spring flower. Where the dragon had been, a scruffy looking naked man hunched against the cool air. Although Mirabel knew nothing about physics, she had just observed that the energy released when a large form condensed to a small one could generate enough heat to activate seeds and accelerate their growth.

Krystal, who had had her eyes shut, stepped back and opened them. When she saw that the tent was no longer covered by a dragon, and that lumps within the wrinkled canvas suggested the remains of their gear, she made straight for the collapsed entrance. A dirty old man didn’t interest her at all.

Mirabel had gone on guard instinctively, as had Sophora, and the appearance of Cavernous Dire did not reassure them. Decades of life as a man-drake had left him no handsomer than when he had chosen misering over marriage. Now his greasy hair was stringy gray instead of black, and his lanky form even more stooped. A dirty-looking gray beard straggled past his chest no farther than necessary . . . in fact, not quite far enough. He looked like the sort of man who would lurk in dark alleys to accost the sick or feeble.

“Who are you?” Sophora asked, in her Chancellor voice.

“Cavernous Dire,” the man said. His voice squeaked, like an unoiled hinge.

“You’re Cavernous Dire?” Mirabel asked. Her mind boggled, then recalled the shape and expression of Bilious Dire, made a quick comparison, and knew it must be true.

“You were a dragon . . .” Sophora said.

“They tricked me,” the man said. “Just because I was getting rich and they wanted my money . . .” He sounded peevish, like someone whose neighbors would trick him every chance they got.

At that moment the big dragon returned. They had not heard it gliding nearer, but they heard the long hiss as its shadow passed over them.

“Noooo!” wailed Cavernous. “Don’t let it get me!”

“He’s Cavernous Dire?” Krystal said, crawling out from under the tent. “He’s the one we were supposed to rescue? Eeeeuw!” Nonetheless, she struck an attitude, peering up at the big dragon with conscious grace.

Mirabel and Sophora both had swords in hand, but Mirabel knew that they hadn’t anywhere near the force necessary to tangle with a dragon this size. But they also had nowhere safe to run. The dragon smiled, and let its long, thin, red tongue hang out a little, steaming in the morning air.

What might have happened next, she never knew, but Cavernous Dire suddenly snatched her belt knife, and lunged toward Siobhan and the pony Dumpling.

“Here’s treasure!” he screamed, hacking at the horse brasses on Dumpling’s harness.

“Hey—stop that!” Siobhan tried to grab his arm, but Dumpling interfered. The pony backed and spun, fighting Siobhan’s hold and cow-kicking at Cavernous. The dragon seemed to be amused, and let another yard or so of tongue slide out. Cavernous quit hacking at the brasses individually, and slid Mirabel’s knife up under the harness, which parted like butter. Two more slices, and he’d cut it free, all the while dodging Siobhan’s angry swats and Dumpling’s kicks. He snatched it from the ground, dropping Mirabel’s knife, and turned back to the dragon, holding the harness at arm’s length.

“Treasure! Gold! Take it! Go away!”

“Yesss. . . .” The long tongue lapped out, and gathered it in—but Cavernous did not let go, and the tongue wrapped round him too, snatching him back into the dragon’s toothy maw as a lizard might snatch a fly.

A gulp, and the bulge that had been Cavernous Dire disappeared into the dragon’s innards. A flick of the wings, and another, and the dragon was gone, sailing low over the heather, back toward the distant kapootle of murk ox.

Dumpling squealed and bucked, landing on Mirabel’s knife, which shattered.

“My best knife—!” Mirabel said.

“I hope he hasn’t cut his hoof,” Siobhan said.

“My best shirt, ruined!” Krystal held up a nightshirt with a wet stain down one side.

“Shut up Krystal,” they all said.

On the way back to the city, they agreed that Bilious Dire need not know the whole story, only that at the end Cavernous had sacrificed himself for others, and been eaten.

Mirabel’s sister had things to say about the outcome which left a coolness of glacial dimensions between them for more than a year. At Monica’s instigation, the Weeping Willow Sewing Circle paid for a plaque commemorating the Dauntless Courage of Cavernous Dire, in saving the life of four of the King’s Guardswomen from a dragon. Every May-morn, they lay a wreath beneath it. Mirabel Stonefist won’t walk by that corner at all anymore. Siobhan Bladehawk narrowly escaped punishment for defacing the plaque as she tried to correct “Four of the King’s Guardswomen” to “Three of the King’s Guardswomen and One of the King’s Cavalrywomen.”

In the belly of the dragon, Cavernous Dire remains undigested, a situation acceptable to neither him nor the dragon. Neither of them knows that it is Cavernous’s miserly grasp of the pony Dumpling’s horse-brass which maintains this uneasy stasis.

Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had a very satisfactory chat with Balon of Torm, whose arms, dyed orange to the elbow, proved he had been dipping into the treasury. Sophora Segundiflora may be the only person satisfied by the expedition.

Despite repeated association with Bad Companions (i.e., he had stories in both previous CHICKS anthologies and he co-wrote SPLIT HEIRS with me), Lawrence Watt-Evans has authored over two dozen novels (Touched by the Gods is the latest) and over a hundred short stories including the Hugo-winning “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers.”

And now, welcome to the dog eat dog world of politics.

In for Pound

Lawrence Watt-Evans

The moment she was absolutely sure they were out of earshot of anyone else, she hissed at him, “Are you nuts?”

He smiled at her as he held open the car door. “I don’t think so,” he replied.

“But running for mayor?” She stood beside the car, not willing to interrupt the discussion even long enough to take her seat.

“Why not?” he asked, still smiling that toothy smile of his. “Seriously, Jen, do you see anyone better suited to the job? I’m an upstanding member of the community, I’ve had a good education, I have a career in public service . . .”

“Dave, you know why not!” She pointed at the sky. “You’re going to have a demonstration of ‘why not’ in another hour or so!”

His politician’s smile vanished, and he looked at her with an expression that just reeked of sincere concern—an expression she was quite sure he had practiced for hours in front of the mirror.

“And why should that disqualify me from serving as mayor? Surely you realize it’s just an occasional inconvenience. So I’ll be unavailable a couple of nights each month . . .”

“Inconvenience?” She stared at him, astonished. “Dave, you’re a werewolf, remember? You inherited a genuine gypsy curse. That’s a bit more than an inconvenience!”

“Why?” he asked mildly.

Her jaw dropped.

“Really, Jen—it’s not as if I’m running for president. It’s just mayor of Eltonburg. So I’ll want to spend a couple of nights a month in private; so what?” He patted her on the arm, urging her into the car.

Stunned, she sat. She watched through the windshield as he walked around and climbed in the driver’s side.

“Dave,” she said, “suppose there’s a City Council meeting on a full moon? Suppose there’s a disaster—a blizzard, say—on the night of a full moon?”

He shrugged. “I’ll be ill, or unavoidably detained. These things happen; people will understand. It hasn’t been a problem for me before.”

“Before you were just a police lieutenant, not the mayor!”

“Detective lieutenant,” he corrected her—he was touchy about the distinction between the two sides of Eltonburg’s police department, enforcement and investigation. He started the car and looked over his shoulder to be sure the street was clear.

“Whatever. Don’t you think that, even in Eltonburg, some reporter might stumble across the truth? Old Bill Beasley isn’t going to give up his job without a fight, despite the indictments--he’s going to have his people checking up on you all through the campaign, just looking for some little flaw. What if he notices you’re never around at the full moon? How are you going to explain that? Suppose he says you spend a couple of nights a month at the strip clubs down on Route 8—how are you going to prove you don’t?”

Dave frowned as he swung the car around the corner onto Main Street. “He couldn’t prove I do.”

“He wouldn’t have to prove it—what are you going to say instead? That you grow fur and go running through the streets on those nights?”

“Well, why not?” Dave asked. “I’ve never hurt anyone. Sure, I’m not quite myself when I’m a wolf, but I’m no ravening monster. Even real wolves aren’t, and I never completely forget who I am. I’ve chased a few cats, sure, but I never bit or clawed anyone—not even the cats. Not even that damned spitting Persian down on Third Street.”

“So you’d just admit the truth? And you think people will vote for a werewolf? You know how old-fashioned some of the people in this town are—and they’re Mayor Beasley’s biggest supporters. You don’t see Beasley standing up in front of the congregation at Calvary Baptist and getting them worked up about the spawn of Satan?”

“I’m not the spawn of Satan . . .”

“Tell Reverend Henry that!”

He settled into an angry quiet for the remainder of the drive home.

When they were out of the car but still in the garage he burst out, “Damn it, Jenny, I am running for mayor, because somebody has to to get that crook Beasley and his weasely flunkies out of office! Yes, I’m a werewolf, and it is a drawback, and an inconvenience, and we don’t want anyone to find out, but I don’t think it’s going to come out-—maybe Beasley will find out I’m never around at the full moon and will try to make something out of it, but who’ll believe him? I’ll just say it’s private business, all in the family, and you’ll back me up, and my mother will, and the voters’ll believe us. Why shouldn’t they?”

“Because they’re human, and they want to believe the worst of any politician they hear about.” She sighed. “But if you want to risk it, I won’t stop you. You’re right, you’d be the best mayor Eltonburg’s ever had, and someone has to run against Beasley. But I don’t like it, Dave!”

“No one’s asking you to like it,” he muttered. He twitched and stumbled as he reached for the door to the house.

Jenny knew the signs. “Get those clothes off,” she ordered. “We don’t want them torn. That suit cost six hundred dollars.”

He sighed. “Right,” he said, pulling off his tie. “I guess I cut it closer than I meant to.” He slipped off his jacket and handed it to her.

His fingers were already shrinking by the time he started on his shirt buttons, the nails thickening into claws. Jenny hurried to help.

Undressing him was a lot more fun the other twentyodd nights of the month, she thought—he’d be returning the favor, and when the clothes were off he wouldn’t drop down on all fours and run off howling.

He might howl a little, or drop to all fours, but he wouldn’t run off. And he wouldn’t be furry and wagging a tail.

By the time his pants were entirely off he was more wolf than man, and a moment later he was all wolf. He trotted to the overhead door and glanced back at Jenny expectantly.

“Oh, all right,” she said. She pushed the button, and the door lifted. She stopped it once it was high enough for him to slip out.

“Don’t be all night, okay?” she called. “I’d like to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.”

He didn’t answer; instead he ran off, tongue lolling, down the street.

She sighed, pushed the button to close the door, then stooped and scooped up his clothes. It would serve him right if she didn’t wait up, and he turned back on the front porch.

Of course, then the neighbors might see him out there naked, which would be hard to live down--and his mayoral hopes would be completely dashed. She trudged into the house and up the stairs, the bundle of clothes in her hand.

An hour later she was in the kitchen, treating herself to a glass of wine, when she heard the growl of a truck’s engine and glanced out the front window.

She froze, and set the wineglass down carefully. Then she rounded the corner to the foyer and stepped out the front door onto the porch.

The Animal Control van was cruising slowly down the street; as she watched it stopped under a streetlight, and a man in a gray uniform jumped out, holding a pole with a loop on the end.

A second man came around the front of the van. “There he is!” he called, pointing at the Rosenthals’ bushes.

Her heart sank. Dave had been careless, and had been spotted.

She tried to think what she could do. If she claimed he was her dog . . . well, they had discussed this. He had no collar, no registration, no vaccination tag, and the Animal Control people would insist, quite reasonably, that she take her dog in and get him a license and get his shots taken care of.

Except he couldn’t come in for a rabies shot unless the full moon was in the sky, and the vets weren’t generally open then.

The two men were rushing for the bushes, one to either side, trapping their prey between them. She saw a flash of gray fur, and the two men dove, pole sweeping around, and then the three were all in a heap on the Rosenthals’ lawn, and a moment later the two men were dragging a snarling, struggling wolf toward the van.

“Hey!” she called, stepping down from the porch—she’d find a way around the problem with the shots; maybe she could claim religious grounds for not having it done. “Hey, that’s my dog!”

The two men ignored her as they heaved Dave into the cage in the back of the van and slammed it shut. She hurried toward them.

Once the cage was locked, one of them turned to face her.

“That’s my dog,” she said, pointing.

“He hasn’t got a tag,” the uniformed man said.

“We hadn’t got around to it yet.”

“Well, you can’t let him run loose with no tag, lady. Eltonburg’s got a twenty-four-hour leash law.”

“I know, I know, I’m sorry—we’ve just been so busy . . .”

“The law’s the law, lady. You want him back, you can come down to the pound and claim him, first thing in the morning. And bring your checkbook.”

“In the morning?” A vision of Dave waking up naked in a cage at the pound appeared before her. “Can’t I have him back now? I . . . I don’t feel safe without him watching the house!”

The man shook his head. “Sorry, lady. We got rules—we find a dog running loose with no ID, we take it to the pound. No exceptions. Look, it’s just one night.”

“But . . .” She stared at Dave, who stared back at her with frightened yellow wolf-eyes.

The other man slammed the van door. “No exceptions,” he said.

The first man said, a bit more kindly, “Look, lady, we used to cut folks some slack on this, but we just got tired of people who let their dogs run around wild, and promised every time oh yeah, we’ll be down first thing tomorrow and get a license, we’ll put a collar on him right away . . . and then nothing, and two or three days later we’d pick up the same dog chasing someone’s cat up a tree, or digging in someone’s lawn, still with no tag. So now we have to be tough about it—some people ruined it for the rest of us, y’know?”

“I know, but . . .”

“I’m sorry, lady.” He turned away.

She watched helplessly as the two men climbed into their vehicle and drove away.

This was a nightmare. They were taking her husband away! And tomorrow morning, when the moon set, he’d turn back to himself there in the dog pound, stark naked, and they’d find him there, and it would be in all the papers, and they’d assume it was a prank, or that he’d been drunk, and any chance he might actually be elected mayor would be gone . . .

And besides that, it would just be so embarrassing!

She couldn’t let that happen. She had to get him out of the pound tonight.

But how? She supposed there must be someone there at night, but it would just be a guard, and she wouldn’t be able to claim Dave—the night watchman, or whoever was there, would just tell her to come back in the morning.

She’d have to force them to free Dave.

And how was she going to do that? Walk in there with Dave’s service weapon and order them to free her dog?

She blinked as she stood on the lawn, watching the Animal Control van round the corner onto Armistead Avenue.

Why not just walk in with the gun and demand her dog?

Well, for one thing, they would recognize her, and the night watchman probably had a gun of his own.

But she could get around that . . .

She stood, thinking hard, for a moment, then turned and went inside.

A few hours later, somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning, she cruised down the deserted streets and parked the car in an empty lot two blocks from the pound; she didn’t want anyone getting her license number. Then she got out and opened the trunk. She was trembling; it took three tries before she could get the key in the lock.

It opened at last, though, and she reached in and pulled out Dave’s bulletproof vest.

She’d never worn it before, and it was too big for her, but she got it on and tied it in place, the kevlar panels pressing uncomfortably on her breasts—it was meant for a man, not a woman, and she was bigchested.

Then she pulled on the old black raincoat, to further hide her figure—she was already wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, to make it as difficult as possible to see any distinctive details about her. Her feet were in old deck shoes with black stockings pulled up over them, to blur any markings or footprints.

Then came the motorcycle helmet with the dark visor, hiding her face and hair completely—and making it hard to see; it was like wearing sunglasses at night.

It was wearing sunglasses at night, really—the tinted visor was meant to serve the same purpose, as well as keeping bugs out of a motorcyclist’s teeth.

And then came the scary part, as she lifted Dave’s pump-action twelve-gauge out of the trunk.

She had fired the gun exactly three times. The first time she had started at the bang when it went off, but the other two she had been ready for it. She had still completely missed the target Dave had set up for her, and the next day her shoulder had been sore from the recoil, but she had fired it.

Her hands trembling again, she loaded five rounds of birdshot into the magazine. That wouldn’t kill anyone, she was pretty sure, but it should be enough to hurt and to scare away anyone who got in her way.

Thus equipped, she marched toward the pound.

There were lights on—not very many, but at least two. That was a good sign; she needed there to be someone in there she could frighten into opening Dave’s cage. She reached the main entrance without serious incident, despite being almost blind with the helmet’s visor down; she had to lift it to peek now and again. Once she reached the entry she held the shotgun in one hand, and pounded on the door with the other.

Nothing happened; she pounded again.

She was starting to think about what she would do if the night watchman refused to answer when a surly voice called, “Who the hell is it at this hour?”

“It’s an emergency,” Jenny called. “I need to use your phone.”

“Oh, Christ . . .” The door started to swing open.

Jenny thrust the barrel of the shotgun into the crack, then pushed herself after it, stepping into the building.

She found herself in a narrow hallway, on a scuffed linoleum floor between green concrete walls, lit by bare bulbs in wire cages overhead. Backing away from her was a young man in a dirty T-shirt and torn jeans.

The lights at least let her see through the confounded visor. “Put up your . . .” she began; then she stopped as she realized he already had both hands raised high.

“Oh god oh god oh god,” he said, stumbling backward down the hall. “Listen, there’s no money here, I swear there isn’t, if there were I’d have stolen it myself.”

“I don’t want money,” Jenny growled, trying to lower her alto voice to a tenor—she had hopes that her disguise hid her sex as well as her face.

“What, did Uncle Bill do something again? Listen, I swear, I didn’t have anything to do . . .”

“Shut up,” Jenny growled, aiming the shotgun at the man’s nose.

The man—a kid, really—shut up and froze where he was.

Uncle Bill?

“Who are you?” Jenny demanded. “Who’s Uncle Bill?”

“I’m Rafe Hayes,” the kid said. “Uncle Bill’s the mayor. My mom’s brother.”

“Mayor Beasley is your uncle?” She stared for a moment; yes, there was a resemblance. “He got you this job?”

Rafe nodded eagerly. “You don’t want to hurt me,” he said. “My uncle would get really pissed.”

“I don’t care what your uncle wants!” Jenny roared—aware as she did that her bellow was not up to Dave’s standards; she didn’t have a man’s lung capacity or a cop’s experience in yelling. “I’m here for my . . . for the animals.” It had occurred to her at the last instant that revealing she was after a particular “dog” might not be wise. She didn’t want to attract everyone’s attention to that one specific canine, especially not when she’d told the animal control crew that Dave was her dog.

“Oh!” The kid looked suddenly relieved. “You’re an animal rights activist? Which group?”

“Uh . . . Free Our Furry Friends,” Jenny improvised hastily.

“I haven’t heard of that one . . .”

“We’re new.”

“So, like, do you have a specific agenda? Have you got a truck here, or something, to take ’em away?”

“That’s not your problem. You just open the doors I tell you to open and keep your mouth shut and your hands where I can see ’em.” She jabbed with the gun; Rafe’s hands, which had started to descend, rushed back up toward the ceiling.

“Okay,” he said, staring at the gun.

“Good. Now, where are the cages?”

Rafe led the way down the corridor and through a door into the depths of the pound. Jenny found herself surrounded by dogs of all sizes and varieties, most of them asleep, a few stirring at this unexpected intrusion. A Great Dane whined at her, and a Pomeranian yapped.

She didn’t see Dave.

“Where are the newest ones?” she asked. “The ones they brought in tonight?”

“Oh, they’re in the other room,” Rafe said. “We don’t put ’em in here until the vet’s okayed them.”

“Show me,” she growled. An Alsatian growled in response. “Shut up,” Jenny told the dog. Then she gestured with the gun.

Rafe led the way to the holding area; here half the cages were empty, several held cats—and crammed into one of them was a big gray wolf, wide awake and watching them silently.

“Let that one out first,” Jenny said, pointing. “That cage is too small for him; it’s inhumane.”

“Yessir,” Rafe said. He fetched a ring of keys from a peg by the door and unlocked Dave’s cage. Dave bounded out the instant the door opened, then hesitated, looking at Jenny and Rafe and Jenny’s gun.

“Good dog,” Jenny said. “You’re free now.” She waved at the room’s open door, and Dave trotted out into the passageway, out of sight.

Now Jenny found herself facing a dilemma; to maintain her cover story of being an animal rights activist she needed to let more animals go—but she didn’t particularly want a bunch of strays roaming the area.

She hoped they wouldn’t do any real harm.

“Let out the others,” she said.

Rafe hurried to unlock the cages, releasing the half-dozen cats—and while he was doing that, Jenny stepped back out into the hallway and closed the door.

Dave was waiting there; he looked up at her expectantly. Obviously, he thought she had a plan.

She didn’t; she was making this up as she went along. She needed some way to get out of here without making a mess of it all. She wasn’t a detective like Dave, with lots of police training . . .

Police. She looked at him, and then smiled.

“Is that a siren?” she shouted. “Damn it, did you call the cops?”

“No, I swear . . . !” Rafe called back. A cat yowled and hissed, and Rafe muttered something Jenny couldn’t make out.

“You stay in there until I tell you to come out, you . . . you untrustworthy person, you!”

Lame, Jenny, she told herself. Really lame. “You untrustworthy person”? She giggled. “Come on, Dave,” she said. “The car’s that way.”

Together, woman and wolf ran for the door.

They were almost there when Rafe burst out of the room with a pistol in his hand and fired at her.

The first shot went wild, chipping concrete from the wall, but the sharp bang startled Jenny; she stumbled, but caught herself without falling.

The second shot hit her square in the back and felt like she’d been kicked.

“Ow,” she said, as she turned around and raised the shotgun.

Dave had already spun around and was charging down the hallway; Rafe fired again, this time at the animal plunging toward him.

“No!” Jenny shouted, raising the shotgun—but she couldn’t shoot; she might hit Dave.

Dave didn’t seem to be hurt. Rafe fired again, at point-blank range, and then Dave’s teeth closed on his wrist. Jenny heard something crunch horribly, and the pistol fell to the floor. Then Rafe went over backward, the wolf on top of him . . .

“No!” Jenny shouted. “Da— Don’t! Get off him!” She raised the shotgun again and pointed it directly at her own husband.

The wolf turned and glared at her, those big yellow eyes almost glowing. For a moment they stared at each other—and Jenny realized she was staring along the barrel of the shotgun, the sights aimed directly at Dave.

She lowered the gun, and Dave leapt off Rafe and ran for the door.

Jenny hesitated until she heard Rafe groan—he was alive and conscious, so she didn’t think he could be that badly hurt. She turned and yanked open the door; Dave bounded out, with Jenny close behind.

A moment later they were in the car, Dave in the back and Jenny driving. She pulled out of the lot with tires squealing.

They made it home safely, and Jenny staggered inside. She dropped the shotgun, peeled off her black raincoat and her Kevlar armor, tossed aside the motorcycle helmet, and then leaned against a wall, panting. Utterly exhausted, she let herself slide down until she was sitting on the floor.

Dave came to her, tongue lolling from his mouth, and put his head in her lap. She petted him once before falling asleep, sprawled there in the foyer.

She was awakened by the transformation; dawn’s light was streaming into the house, and the head in her lap had changed from a wolf’s to a man’s. Dave’s eyes, human once again, looked up at her.

“That little bastard shot you!” he said.

“I had your bulletproof vest on,” she said. “He shot you, and you weren’t wearing anything!”

He still wasn’t, she noticed admiringly. Her husband was unquestionably a fine-looking man—when he was a man at all.

“Just fur,” he said. “I guess the stories are true, though—you need silver bullets to kill a werewolf.”

“I would rather never have tested that,” she said, stroking his hair.

“Would you really have shot me if I’d done what I wanted to and ripped his throat out?” Dave asked.

“I don’t know,” Jenny admitted. “And I really don’t want to test that one!”

“Same here,” he said. “But I’m glad you aimed—helped me get my temper back under control. I mean, the little bastard shot you!”

“I’m fine,” Jenny insisted.

Dave sat up. “Let me see your back,” he said.

She was too tired to argue; she turned and let Dave pull up her shirt.

“Nasty bruise,” he said. “Skin’s not broken.”

“Told you,” she muttered.

“Yeah, you did,” he agreed. “And you told me I was crazy to run for mayor, and you were right about that, too.” He shook his head. “I probably broke that kid’s wrist tonight, and I might’ve killed him. And . . . and if the silver bullet part is true, then maybe the contagious bite is true, too, and he’ll be out there running around on all fours next month, same as me. That’s bad, and we’ll have to do something about it. This whole werewolf thing—I was kidding myself, Jen. It’s not just an inconvenience. It’d never work, me being mayor.”

She twisted around to face him. “You’re not going to run?” she asked.

“No, I’m not,” he said.

She remembered Rafe Hayes talking about his uncle, Bill Beasley. She remembered Rafe making threats and promises and firing that gun wildly. She remembered a dozen other things about Bill Beasley and his family, and she considered what might have to be done to ensure that Rafe Hayes didn’t become a public menace at the next full moon.

“Then I will,” she said.

Russian-born Marina Frants’s first Baba Yaga story, “A Bone to Pick” (co-authored with husband Keith R.A. DeCandido) appeared in Did You Say Chicks?! She’s back with a tale which demonstrates that any quest requiring you to kill someone known as “the Deathless” is going to be, well, a Learning Experience.

Death Becomes Him

Marina Frants

“Someone’s coming,” Baba Yaga announced from the kitchen. “A man on a horse.”

Vassilisa put aside the stocking she was darning, got up from her chair, and walked over to the window. She saw no sign of a rider, and heard nothing but the usual forest noises. But if Yaga said someone was coming, then someone undoubtedly was. Vassilisa turned away from the window.

“Is this good news or bad news?” she asked.

Yaga looked up form the stewpot she was stirring to aim a gap-toothed grin at her apprentice.

“Depends on what you consider good, doesn’t it?”

Vassilisa rolled her eyes. “Are we going to talk to him, hide from him, or add him to the stew?”

The last suggestion was only half-serious. In the six months Vassilisa had known her, Baba Yaga has shown no taste for human flesh, no matter what the stories said. She did, however, use human bones for some of her more powerful spells, and if their visitor had hostile intentions, he stood a good chance of ending up in pieces in the pantry.

Yaga looked mildly annoyed. “I suppose we’ll talk to him. He’s bringing a gift.”

Once again, Vasssilisa took the statement on faith. Yaga always knew what was going on in the forest. She could talk to the dead trees, the dry leaves, the bones in the ground. Vassilisa was slowly learning to do the same, but it still took her a great deal of painstaking, exhausting, and often smelly ritual to perform spells that Yaga could cast with a thought.

She returned to her sewing, resisting the temptation to pester Yaga with questions. If the rider was bearing a gift, then he was probably going to petition for a favor, which meant he was very desperate indeed. Favors from Baba Yaga tended to come at a high, and often unexpected, price. Vassilisa had found that out six months before, when she came seeking a way to save her village from the Tatars, and ended up leaving that village forever to become Yaga’s apprentice. Not to mention housemaid, gardener, and general errand-girl.

Outside below the windows, a horse snorted nervously and stamped its hooves on the ground. A man’s voice called out, “Hello? Anyone in the house?”

He repeated his call four times before Yaga poked her head out the kitchen door to glare at Vassilisa.

“Well? Are you going to go out and speak to him?”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not looking for me,” Vassilisa grumbled, but she put down her sewing again, and went to fetch the ladder.

She caught a glimpse of the visitor as she opened the door—a tall, broad-shouldered young man in a shabby cloak, riding a chestnut horse. He was looking up at the hut’s windows, one hand shielding his eyes against the sun. Vassilisa felt terribly self-conscious as she climbed down, presenting shabby skirts and faded stockings to his view. Most of the time, she rather liked living in a hut that stood on chicken legs. It kept most of the forest critters out—legs simply shook off and stomped anything that tried to climb them. But at times like this, she really wished she could teach the damn things to squat.

By the time she reached solid ground, the rider had ismounted. He stood at the gate, watching Vassilisa with a puzzled frown.

“Baba Yaga?” he asked in a tone of shocked disbelief.

Vassilisa fought down a snicker. It had to be a bit disconcerting, she supposed, to come searching for a legendary ancient sorceress, and be presented with a freckle-faced young woman in a homemade dress.

“No,” she said, and didn’t know whether to be amused or insulted by the expression of relief on his face. “I’m Vassilisa, Yaga’s apprentice. You can tell me what you need.”

He hesitated for a moment, then swept off his hat and bowed to her, just as politely as if she’d been Yaga herself.

“Thank you. My name is Aleksei. I need your—Yaga’s—help. I’ve brought payment . . .” He turned to untie a bulging sack from his saddle. The sack looked heavy, and rattled when he dropped it to the ground. Aleksei dug inside it, and pulled out an oversized gold goblet with a green enamel base and a circle of emeralds around the lip of the bowl. He held it out to Vassilisa, who nearly dropped it. She had never held anything made of gold before. The goblet was much heavier than it looked.

“I have more,” Aleksei told her earnestly. “As much as you want. You can have this whole bag if Yaga helps me.”

Vassilisa turned the goblet over in her hands, frowning. She couldn’t imagine what they’d do with it. It was much too large and heavy to actually drink from. Sell it, maybe? They’d need to travel all the way to Kiev to find a buyer who could afford such a thing. Vassilisa shrugged. It hardly mattered. Knowing Yaga, the price would end up being something else entirely.

“What do you need?” she asked.

Aleksei hesitated again, staring down at the ground and shifting from foot and foot. Finally he opened his cloak to reveal a knee-length coat of chainmail underneath.

“It’s this armor,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?” It looked like very good armor, well-made and brightly polished, much finer than the rest of Aleksei’s clothes.

Aleksei looked at Vassilisa with pleading eyes. “I can’t get the cursed thing off!”

Vasillisa bit her lip. She wasn’t going to laugh. Aleksei didn’t strike her as the brightest person she’s ever met but he was, presumably, capable of undressing himself. So there had to be a real problem there.

“Tell me all about it.”

Aleksei, it turned out, had discovered an abandoned castle about a week’s ride to the north, and gone in to explore it. He had found mice, bats, spiders, dust, and a great deal of treasure lying about, but no people. No living people, anyway.

“There was a skeleton on the floor in one of the treasure chambers,” Aleksei said. “Buried under a pile of gold. The bones were scorched, and his clothes were all burnt away, but the armor was still bright and shiny. Not even dust had settled on it. I figured it had to be enchanted, so I . . .”

“So you robbed him.”

Aleksei gave her a defensive look. “He didn’t need it anymore, did he? I thought it would protect me in battle.”

“It didn’t protect the previous owner,” Vassilisa pointed out. Aleksei blinked.

“No, I suppose it didn’t. I hadn’t thought of that. So can Baba Yaga help me?”

Vassilisa tucked the jeweled goblet under her arm and returned to the ladder.

“I’ll see what we can do.”

“Hmph.” Yaga lifted the goblet in her gnarled hands, and tapped one crooked nail against the stem. “Useless piece of junk. Still, the boy did bring a gift. I guess you’d better help him.”

“Me?” Vassilisa sputtered. “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to get that armor off him!”

Yaga fixed her with a narrow-eyed frown, the kind she usually got when Vassilisa bungled a spell, or forgot a lesson, or didn’t get the dishes clean enough.

“And what do you do when you don’t know?”

That was one of the earliest lessons. Vassilisa sighed. “You find someone who knows, and ask.”

“And who would know, in this case?”

Vassilisa opened her mouth to answer, and quickly closed it again. Her first impulse was to say the wizard who enchanted the armor, but they didn’t know who it was, and had no way to find out. She thought about it for a moment.

“The previous owner?”

“Good girl. The man’s bones are still in the castle, aren’t they? Go and talk to him.”

“But—” Vassilisa began, then stopped. Why was she arguing? Yaga wasn’t asking her to do anything she hadn’t done before. Doing it for practice in the warm safety of the hut might be more comfortable than doing it for real, but the process was the same, wasn’t it? “All right. I’ll go get ready.” She headed toward the small closet where she and Yaga kept the dried herbs used in their spells.

“Take the flying mortar!” Yaga called after her. “I can’t spare you for two weeks, you know! There’s spring cleaning to be done.”

“I don’t know how you managed before I came along,” Vassilisa muttered, busily sorting through rows of little jars on the closet shelves. “Which reminds me—what are you going to demand for payment?”

“Payment?”

“Well, you’re not going to take that silly goblet, are you? As you said, the thing’s useless. So what will you take?”

“When you came to me, did I tell you the price in advance?”

“No.”

“Then don’t ask stupid questions now.”

“Are you sure Baba Yaga cannot come herself?” Aleksei asked for what had to be the hundredth time. “It could be dangerous, after all . . .”

“The castle is abandoned,” Vassilisa snapped. “You said so yourself. Nothing there but bats and mice and a dead man with no armor. That much, I think I can handle.”

“But—”

“She’s busy!”

It was clear that Aleksei did not think that Vassilisa could help him. It was getting to be insulting. All right, so she wasn’t a great sorceress who knew everything and could cast spells with a thought. She could do this . . . couldn’t she?

Sighing, she hiked up her skirt and climbed into Yaga’s mortar—a narrow waist-high bowl carved from a single oak stump—which she’d dragged from its little shed in the back of the garden.

“Hand me that bag, will you?”

Aleksei handed her the tattered sack where she’d packed the herbs she would need for the spell. Vassilisa resisted the urge to dig through it again. She had already gone over it three times. Everything was there. And this endless checking and rechecking would only serve to convince Aleksei that she didn’t know what she was doing. Vassilisa clutched the sack to her chest and leaned forward as far as she could to make room for Aleksei behind her.

“Climb in,” she ordered.

It was a tight squeeze. The mortar really wasn’t made for two people. Vassilisa wrinkled her nose as Aleksei’s chest pressed against her back. He smelled like . . . well, like someone who hadn’t taken his armor off for a week. She tried to take shallow breaths as she recited the activating spell on the mortar.

They lifted into the air with a lurch and a wobble, and a startled yelp from Aleksei. Vassilisa ignored him, and concentrated her thoughts on guiding their flight. The wind whipped her hair back and lifter her shawl off her shoulders, so that she had to clutch the ends in one hand to keep it on. She loved this. All the hours spent cleaning Yaga’s dishes and scrubbing Yaga’s floors were made worth it by these moments of magic.

The forest rushed by below them in a green blur, flat at first, then sloping upwards as they entered hillier country. Aleksei’s arms were wrapped tightly around Vassilisa’s waist, but she barely remembered he was there. She almost missed his cry of “There!” but caught herself in time and guided the mortar down.

It was a strange place to build a castle. No towns nearby, not even a village. Just trees. The castle, with its moss-grown walls and crumbling towers, looked as if a giant hand had picked it up somewhere else, and dropped it carelessly in the forest. Vassilisa brought the mortar down in the central courtyard with only a slight jolt. She climbed out, and hopped up and down a few times to work the kinks out of her knees.

“All right, Aleksei. Lead the way.”

The inside of the castle was dim and musty. Most of the wooden doors had rotted away, and all the windows were broken. The ceiling of was lost in shadows. Vassilisa could hear scurrying sounds in the corners. Every now and then, a dark shape fluttered overhead—birds or bats, she couldn’t be sure.

It was easy to retrace Aleksei’s steps from the footprints he’d left in the dust on his first visit. They walked through wide, echoing corridors, brushing aside the occasional cobweb as they passed, until they reached an arched doorway. The door hung at an angle, one hinge rusted all the way through, the other barely holding. It squeaked ominously as Aleksei pushed it open. Vassilisa followed him in and froze, staring.

She’d never seen that much wealth in her entire life. She’d never even imagined that much. There were mountains of coin, piled higher than Aleksei’s head. There were gems of all colors, strewn about like pebbles. Jeweled belts and necklaces lay tangled in the dust, rings glittered on the stone floor, surrounded by rat droppings and dead bugs.

Vasilisa had never given much thought to possessing great riches, but the sight still held her transfixed for a moment. She imagined herself draped in velvet and brocade, with jeweled slippers on her feet, dancing at the Prince’s court in Kiev. She picked up a diamond necklace from the floor and held it to her throat.

The sight of the gems glittering against the faded linen of her dress restored her perspective. She shook her head, and let he necklace fall from her fingers. This wasn’t what she came for.

“Show me the bones.”

The skeleton lay atop a glittering spill of gold and silver. It must’ve been there a long time. The bones had faded to a dull white, except for the parts that were scorched black. A dented helmet, tarnished with age, adorned the skull.

“I didn’t realize he’d be so long dead.” Vassilisa knelt at the skeleton’s side. Most of the dead man’s clothes had been burned to blackened shreds, but a few small tatters remained. She could see a glimmer of gold thread on the brittle fabric, indicating that the dead man had been more than just a wandering peasant. “It’ll make the spell harder.”

“Can you do it?” Aleksei looked dubious. Vassilisa glared at him.

“Of course I can do it!” I think. “Clear me some space on the floor, will you?”

She poured a handful of tinder into a shallow clay bowl and lit it, nursed the spark to a steady flame, then poured on the herbs from her jars, one pinch at a time. The flame turned yellow, then blue, then green. a bittersweet smell permeated the air. Vassilisa closed her eyes, clasped the piece of cloth in her fist, and leaned forward to breathe in the smoke.

Yaga always claimed that this part wasn’t necessary. Useless trappings, she said, a prop for the weak-willed. The power in spell came from the caster, not from dead plants and smelly smoke. That was all very well if you were as old as the forest, and could speak to rocks and raise the dead with a thought, but when most of your life had been spent tending a vegetable garden and raising chickens, and magic crept up on you unawares, your will needed a prop. Vassilisa took another deep breath, and chanted the spell.

The words floated upwards on wisps of scented smoke. Vassilisa’s eyes remained closed, but white sparks danced across her vision, like afterimages of lightning. The piece of cloth in her hand felt hot. She let the heat flow through her, and out into the air again, searching for any remnant of the dead man’s spirit, demanding that he speak.

“What?!” The voice rang in her head, startling her into gasping in too much smoke all at once. Vassilisa fell back, coughing, but kept her eyes closed.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“You’re the one who dragged me back from the dead, you tell me!” The voice sounded ill-tempered. The dead often were. Vassilisa’s instinct was to apologize, to offer an explanation, but Yaga had warned her not to try. Arguing with the dead was a fruitless task, she said. They had all the time in the world, and would keep you talking until the spell wore off, just for spite. You had to command them, not convince them.

She let more power bleed into her, then sent it after the voice, repeating her question with more insistence.

“Who are you?”

There was a short, resentful silence before the answer drifted into her thoughts like the smoke.

“Ivan Tsarevitch.”

A tsarevitch? Vassilisa bit back another apology, this time for speaking out of turn to royalty. She needed to get to the point before the flame in the bowl burned out and the spell wore off.

“You were wearing an enchanted coat of armor when you died. What does the spell do?”

“Nothing bad.” This time, the voice held a note of exaggerated innocence. “It’s a protection spell. Go ahead, put the coat on.”

Spiteful bastard. “Someone already has. How does he get it off?”

Silence. Vassilisa opened her eyes just long enough to throw another handful of herbs on the fire.

“How?”

“Kill Koschei the Deathless.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Now Ivan sounded smug. Vassilisa was beginning to get an image of him, a golden-haired, blue-eyed, arrogant fellow in fine clothes, smirking at her with his arms folded across his chest. But she had no idea if this was really him, or just the image he wanted her to see, or simply her own imagination putting a face to the snide voice. “This is Koschei’s castle. I came here to kill him, for he was threatening my father with sorcery. I didn’t want to go.” The smirk changed to a scowl. “He’s a sorcerer, what was I supposed to do against him? So Father had this armor made for me. It will turn any blade and deflect any arrow. It also wouldn’t come off until I either died, or spilled Koschei’s blood.”

Vassilisa decided that she didn’t blame Ivan for being ill-tempered. That was a rotten thing to do to someone. She suspected that Ivan had been a troublesome younger son.

“What happened?” she asked.

“He killed me, of course. What need does a sorcerer have for blade or arrow? He threw a ball of flame at me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Good. I’m glad somebody is. Can I go now?”

Vassilisa released the spell, and watched Ivan’s image fade from her mind. It was a waste of time feeling sorry for him, she told herself. He’d been dead for decades, there was nothing she could do for him. Better to concentrate on Aleksei.

He was squatting a few feet away, watching her with concern.

“Are you all right? You were talking to yourself.”

“I’m fine.” Vassilisa’s mouth felt sticky, and her eyes stung, but it was only a side effect of the smoke, and she was used to it. “You, on the other hand, are in trouble.”

Aleksei’s face grew steadily paler as Vassilisa related her conversation with Ivan Tsarevitch.

“B-b-but,” he stammered when she was done, “Koschei hasn’t been heard from in years!”

“That’s because he’s dead,” Vassilisa said with a sigh.

“He is? How do you know?”

“Yaga told me. And don’t ask me how she knows. But Koschei the Deathless is now Koschei the Dead, which makes it difficult for you to kill him, doesn’t it?”

Aleksei’s shoulders slumped. “What do I do then?

“I don’t know. Let me think.” Vassilisa stood up and paced. The sensible action would be to go back and ask Yaga for advice. But that would mean admitting defeat in the first independent task Yaga had ever assigned her. She couldn’t do it. It was too embarrassing. “Blood. Ivan said blood.”

Aleksei blinked at her. “What about it?”

“At first he said you must kill Koschei to get the armor off. But later, he said you must spill his blood. There’s a difference.”

“What difference? He’s dead!”

“Then there must be a body somewhere.” Vassilisa stopped packing, and stooped down to repack her bag. “Let’s go find it.”

Finding a single dead body in an empty castle proved daunting. There was no crypt in the castle, and nothing on the grounds that looked like a grave. Vassilisa and Aleksei trudged up and down the corridors, checking every room as they went.

“What will we do when we find him?” Aleksei asked, as they climbed yet another flight of stairs.

“I can cast a spell to restore his body. Then you spill his blood, and we’ll see if that helps.”

“You’re going to bring Koschei the Deathless back to life?” Aleksei looked as if he wasn’t sure which one of them had gone mad.

Vassilisa rolled her eyes. “Of course not! I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. But I can bring his body back to the way it was before it rotted. It won’t last long, without a spirit to keep it together, but you only need a few seconds to spill blood.”

She stopped, because the staircase had come to an end. They stood at a long, narrow landing with a single door at the far end. Vassilisa gave it a push, but it wouldn’t budge. “Locked. But it looks—”

“Let me try.” Aleksei launched himself forward, slamming his shoulder against the door. The boards promptly shattered to splinters. Aleksei, caught by surprise, fell through the opening with a cry and a crash.

“—rotten.” Vassilisa finished, coming in after him.

The room proved to be yet another treasure chamber, they’d seen a dozen like it in their search. Vassilisa found that the sight of gold and jewels no longer impressed her. The body in the center of the room, on the other hand, impressed her a great deal.

Koschei had not been dead quite as long as Ivan Tsarevitch. Parchment-dry skin still covered his bones, and a few wisps of white hair clung to his skull. His fur-trimmed boots and long coat of sea-green brocade were mouse-chewed and moldy, but still holding together. He lay curled up in a narrow space between two chests full of gems, one hand buried among the glittering stones. Vassilisa shuddered. He must’ve died there alone, counting his wealth as life slipped away . . .

She shook off the image, and helped Aleksei to his feet.

“Have your sword ready. A body this old won’t stay restored for more than a few seconds.”

Aleksei looked slightly ill, but drew his blade without comment.

This was a simpler spell, which was just as well, because Vassilisa was running low on herbs. There would be no need to drag an unwilling spirit into a conversation. All she had to do was convince a pile of long-dead bones that they weren’t all that long dead. She didn’t even bother to close her eyes as she chanted the spell.

As she spoke, the corpse began to twitch. The withered hands stirred, dislodging a fall of precious stones onto the floor. The skin bulged and swelled in odd places as layers of flesh reappeared over bone. Aleksei made a gagging noise, and crossed himself with a shaking hand. Vassilisa, lost in the feel of the power flowing through her, barely spared him a glance.

“Get ready,” she muttered.

And then the flame in her bowl exploded in a blinding red burst that nearly scorched her face off. Vassilisa fell back with a cry. The spell spun out of her control, twisting into something new, something too powerful for her to hold on to. The force of it sent her sprawling to the floor. She lay there breathless, blinking the fireburst’s afterimage from her eyes. Her vision cleared just in time to see Koschei rise to his feet.

“Why, thank you, girl.” His voice was a soft rustle, like dry leaves in the wind. “I was hoping someone would do that.”

Vassilisa tried to suppress a whimper, and failed miserably. What had she been thinking, casting a spell on a sorcerer’s body? She must’ve been delirious. She should’ve known he’d be there, waiting for a way back.

Koschei advanced on her with shuffling steps. His movements were slow and jerky, his body obviously still trying to remember how to walk. Vassilisa scrambled away from him. Koschei raised one hand. A ball of fire coalesced in his cupped palm.

“Leave her alone!” Aleksei lunged forward. Koschei seemed mildly surprised to find there was another person in the room. He turned, and threw the fireball at Aleksei instead of Vassilisa.

Aleksei proved better at ducking than Ivan Tsarevitch had. He fell flat on the floor, somehow managing to hold on to his sword as he hit. The fireball struck the wall behind him, leaving a black smear.

Vassilisa felt the shimmer of magic in the air as Koschei cast his spell. She tried to grasp it, but it was too wild, and she was too frightened to concentrate. She watched Aleksei climb to his knees and then drop again, just in time to avoid a burst of flame that melted a pile of silver nuggets into slag.

“Look what you did!” Koschei sounded peevish. “You made me spoil my treasure.” He lifted his arm again.

Vassilisa grabbed the first thing that came to hand—a gold candlestick—and threw it. It hit Koschei’s arm, spoiling his aim and giving Aleksei a chance to take shelter behind a tall stack of gold bars. Unfortunately, it also focused his attention on her once again.

Vassilisa scrambled back in time to avoid being cooked, though too late to keep her skirt from getting singed. She could barely see or breathe from the smoke, but now that she had survived the first few seconds of Koschei’s attack, her fear was receding. The sorcerer was powerful, but he was also slow and clumsy. And every time he cast a spell, the maelstrom of magic in the air grew calmer, more manageable.

Vassilisa clambered over to where Aleksei was squatting behind his golden barricade. He gave her a grim look, frightened but not hysterical.

“Distract him,” Vassilisa whispered.

Aleksei’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to object, closed it again, gave a resigned shrug, and moved into the open.

Vassilisa crouched low on the floor to keep out of Koschei’s sight, and closed her eyes. She had never tried this sort of spontaneous magic before, but Yaga insisted it could be done, and now was certainly a good time to try. To help herself concentrate, she imagined her little bowl of herbs in front of her, the tiny spark of flame in the center, the smell of pungent smoke in her nose. The presence of real smoke in the room actually helped. She touched the magic swirling about her, and waited for the lull that signaled Koschei’s latest attack. When it came, she reached out with her mind and began, ever so slowly, to reverse her earlier spell.

She knew it was working when she heard Koschei scream. The air seemed to tremble as he struggled against her spell. Vassilisa groaned. He was so strong, she felt like she was trying to push a mountain from its base. But his body was weak, still more used to death than to life, and it gave her something to work with. Vassilisa held on to the spell, despite the growing pain in her head, knowing that her advantage grew with every passing second.

Koschei’s scream turned into a whimper, then a groan. There was a thud as something soft and heavy hit the floor. The mountain of magic that Vassilisa was pushing against suddenly gave way, then vanished. Vassilisa opened her eyes.

Koschei’s body was sprawled facedown on the floor, motionless. Vassilisa did not need a closer look to know that he was dead again—the flesh was already beginning to rot. Aleksei knelt a few paces away. His sword was on the floor next to him, and he was holding an oversize gilt platter in front of him as a shield. His hair and clothes were singed, but he seemed unharmed.

“Hurry up!” Vassilisa shouted at him. “Spill his blood while he still has some!”

Aleksei dropped the platter, snatched up his sword again, and shuffled over, still on his knees, to Koschei’s side. He lifted the blade with a grunt, and brought it down in a sweeping arc, striking the dead sorcerer’s head off his shoulders with a single blow.