Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Jinny took one of the turnips and idly spun it in her hand, balancing it on a fingertip with a little help from a magical cantrip. “If only I could flash the water out of you into steam, like I do when I’m jellying you for the winter,” she said.

A thought occurred, and she held the turnip up as if it were speaking back. “But you can!” she squeaked. “Just cast a rune of delay! Then the instant I’m disturbed, I’ll flash-steam! But with no pot to contain me, the result will be mayhem!”

Jinny snickered. “Make me a promise, little man,” she said, laying a hand on her belly. “Never get so old that you’re embarrassed by your mom talking to vegetables.”

There were other cantrips, spells, and knacks that has already been cast. The little garden outside the house had been magicked to produce thicker, juicier veggies on the quickfast; Jinny sprinkled a packet of seeds on it from a little drawer she’d labeled “War Sprouts.”

Outside in the fields, small as they were, the magic had almost entirely gone out of the scythe and bucket that had harvested the meager Sagescrub crops. They were capable of only a few feeble movements, and certainly not enough to fight even though their blades were quite keen. The wagon to move cut crops up to the house had only a tiny amount of knack left, enough for one good trip. Jinny, weakened by the strain of manufacturing an heir and mindful that the Art was not end endless wellspring, couldn’t spare a cantrip to re-enchant it.

Jinny whispered to the cart. “Up there,” she said. “At the top of the path. Wait for my signal.” It obligingly shuddered up the footpath that led into the hills, and, eventually, the Butterhollow homestead. To the pitiful farm tools, she whispered a different missive: “Into the house with you, loves, and speedily.”

The barn had been depleted from the long winter, with just a few goats, chickens, and a nag that Jinny kept more as a pet than a farm animal, as her days of carrying anything other than a small child were long over. She kept her best layer and best milker out of the chickens and goats, and then led the others outside. With a tub of water in one hand and a little bit of ground-up feyroot dust in the other, she wrote a message onto the fur and feathers of her animals, invisible to the naked eye of anyone but its intended recipient.

“Mrs. Butterhollow,” she whispered to one chicken. “Mr. Cuttergrille,” she cooed at a goat. Another chicken was quietly told “Goris Sluffer,” while the final goat was given the name “Feris Skulljelly.” At last, Jinny drew her old nag, Murgatroyd, to her. “Old Mr. Supply Belcher, at the Old Mission.”

Once the ensorcellment was complete, Jinny opened the barn doors and let her animals loose. They departed in five different directions with five different degrees of alaracity. “As long as there’s no rain to wash off the magicks, they should arrive with the messages intact, kiddo,” she said to the babe beneath her armor. “No idea if they’ll actually do anything, but that’s out of my power. If nothing else, my critters don’t have to die if I do.”

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“Jinny! Jinny, I know you’re in there!” Sally cried, pounding at the door to Jinny’s homestead, a combined house-barn with a shared second story. “It’s Sally, and I have something important for you!”

She heard a creaking from inside, a few heavy steps, and Jinny appeared at the door. She wore a potbellied stove cover, hung from her neck, as makeshift armor for a baby bulge that stood out starkly on her wiry frame, carried a repeater engraved with glowing runes of accuracy, and wore a sour look on her face.

“I’ll have you know, it’s not easy to answer the door for company when you’re hiding in the root cellar, love,” Jinny said to Sally. “Come in, I’ll make you some tea.”

“This isn’t a social visit, Jinny,” said Sally. “Word has gotten out.”

“Word of what?” Jinny said. She patted her child-swollen belly. “This? I think if people were gonna get upset about that, love, they might have done it sooner.”

“People set up homesteads out here just to get away from that, I know,” Sally said. A member of the wild folk herself, she nevertheless had frequent contact with Jinny and the traders working out of the Old Mission. “But someone in our band has been fast and loose with their tongue. Word that you sent those easterners to us is out among the wild folk. I heard it from some of the forest elves, and even the humans on the River Ozay are talking about it, according to them. They even know you’ve been hiding in your cellar.”

“And so what?” Jinny said. “If I cared what other people thought, would I be out here in the part of the wild where they don’t ask questions, working hedge-magic and swelled up with a bastard child? The answer’s no, love, in case it wasn’t obvious.”

“Jinny,” Sally said, taking her friend by the shoulders. “An edor is dead, desecrated. Our peoples are furious. Easterners have died. And you pointed a pair of them at our oldest and most respected edor like a pair of steel darts!”

At this, Jinny fell silent a moment. “How soon?” She asked softly. “And how many?”

Sally shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I would expect their visit soon.”

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Sagescrub Valley, in the foothills of the great western mountains, was not particularly popular with the settlers that had been flowing into the wilds. Its hilly ground had poor, rocky soil that could only support a homestead at certain places, and even then the tilling of fields was rocky and fraught with backbreaking labor. Even with the assistance of someone with the Art, whose magic could move boulders if not mountains, it was a hardscrabble life. And although that same rockiness meant that they had never held the land in high esteem, the wild folk who had once foraged there freely were highly ambivalent at best about outsiders.

The only people that made the journey either prized their solitude or had their reasons for not wanting to be found.

Seven people had chosen to brave the difficulties and settle there anyway. The Cuttergrilles, a dwarf couple, had built a waterwheel on the creek and mostly got by fishing and foresting. They also ground anything for anyone, no questions asked, and word had it that Mr. Cuttergrille was on the run from the government back east for illegal grinding of glitterdust.

A couple of halfling mushroom farmers, the Butterhollows, lived near the valley’s subsidiary peaks. Mr. Butterhollow came from a family of seventeen, and Mrs. Butterhollow had a total of twenty-one siblings that had made it out of childhood. They were there for the solitude and the very occasional use of the Cuttergrille mill for making ‘shroom flour.

Goris Sluffer and Minerva DeLouise ran a valley farm of their own, quite successfully. But they were also each married to someone who was not their current farming partner back east, and Goris had an orcish father besides. Sagescrub Valley was far from judgmental and prying eyes, as well as their respective spouses and children.

And then there was Jinny Witchazel, who had a small plot from which she was barely able to glean enough food to get by, and even that required a heavy use of the Art, in which she was quite exceptionally gifted. She was about a month, give or take, from increasing the valley’s population to eight with the birth of her first child. None of the other Sagescrub residents had asked who the father was, and she had not offered the information.

The others were friendly, and Jinny offered her services as a hedge-wizard in exchange for the necessaries that she couldn’t get elsewhere. But the stream of people coming to see her from both the wilds and the towns, from the mountains and the Old Mission, made her neighbors keep her at arm’s length.

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Tizeech returned not long after, and behind her sauntered the sheriff–Sheriff Dallas, to be exact, with a flask in his hip holster instead of a shooting iron. His deputy, Missy Ferguson, was by his side, sullen but silent.

“Well, well,” said Dallas with a light slur in his voice. “What have we here?”

“I told you to get the sheriff,” Miss Scarlet hissed angrily at Tizeech.

“I…I did!” Tizeech stammered.

“The real sheriff, Deputy Ferguson! Not this drunk idiot!” Miss Scarlet was whispering loudly enough for Sheriff Dallas to hear, but he either ignored her or took it as a compliment.

Dallas walked around the room, hands clasped behind his back in what he probably fancied was a thoughtful pose, looking at Pearl on the bed, bound, and Miss Scarlet with a repeater pressed to the chest of a Valley Union man. “Your girl says this man was threatening you with his irons,” said Dallas, “but from where I’m standing, it looks the other way around.”

“Yes, Sheriff, that’s exactly it,” said Miss Scarlet. “You’ve uncovered my nefarious plot to tie up Pearl and then shoot the gun out of the hand of my own john.”

Deputy Ferguson had untied Pearl, who stood up. “I can vouchsafe that this scoundrel is the malefactor here,” she said. “Miss Scarlett saved me, no thanks to your and your lead-footed pace in getting up here.”

“And yet, from where I’m standing, it looks like the law is on the side of this man here,” said Dallas, jabbing a finger at Edenburner. “I think you’d better let him go, missy.”

“What law, in what fever dream, in the head of which diseased syphilitic codger, says that?” Miss Scarlet cried.

“This law,” said Sheriff Dallas. “Right here.” He opened his duster, reached into his waistcoat, and produced a folded piece of paper. Unfolding it, and pinching a pair of pince-nez spectacles on his nose to read it, he intoned gravely. “Let it be known that, under the authority of the acting civil servants during the duration of this emergency rail severance, that this warrant permits the search of suspicious environs by the agent designate hereafter named, and protects the same from any recourse, legal or moral, that might arise from the ensuing investigation.” He looked up. “Signed this day by Sheriff Brandon Dallas on behalf of Mr. Jedidiah Edenburner.”

Exasperated, Miss Scarlet lowered her repeater. “You have a search warrant for my place, signed today? That is corruption, sir, pure and simple.”

“Is it, now, missy?” Dallas said. “The head of the Valley Union office came down to have a talk with me this afternoon, said that he had a suspicion that you might be engaged in some sort of…questionable behavior. I signed the warrant over to his agent on the spot.”

“In other words, as soon as his gold coins hit your pocket!” cried Pearl. “This man’s boss bribed you to get him out of trouble!”

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The waves were crashing on the shore; it was a lovely sight. Italy is now my favorite country; in fact, I plan to spend two more weeks there next year. If I don’t like something, I’ll stay away from it; before this past visit, I hadn’t been to Italy in a decade.

The memories of those waves were just too near.

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“Of course.” the words echoed up the elevator shaft, creaking and sepulchral. “What else but for the building, my building, to be my flesh? The furnace beats as a heart, the elevators pump as blood. But as any body, sustenance is required.”

The doors cracked open invitingly, bleeding light into the hallway–an alluring, otherworldly light.

“Come.”

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“What, exactly, is Rat Schism?” said Taylor, looking at her vandalized MERRY CHRISTMAS letter blocks.

“It commemorates the 1054 split between the brown and black rats,” said Chris, “when the Rat Pope excommunicated the Rat Patriarch and vice versa. Centuries of strife followed, and only now are the first embers of reconciliation stirring.”

“I think it means you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”

“Fair enough.”

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“Looks like he broke the lock and had been living in here,” the detective said. “Makes sense. The substation’s a lot warmer than outside, and it’s not checked unless there’s a problem.”

“So you think…accidental electrocution?” said the officer/

“I think we were meant to believe it was,” said the detective. “But there’s just one thing that doesn’t add up. The electricity clearly entered his body here, and left here. There’s no conceivable way, based on how he was found that it could have entered his body through the small of his back.”

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“This sacred document has been handed down in my family for a century. Now I come before you to demand that you make it right.”

The CEO of PowerCo squinted at the fine print. “Summon the Battery Council,” he rumbled. “We have our first claim on the 100-year guarantee.”

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Miss Scarlet had a .30-30 cartridge in her hands, and she was focusing every ounce of the Art she could into it, whispering cantrips for speed, accuracy, and above all, discretion into its very fabric. She felt the power leaving her, and prayed that it would enter the cartridge as she had planned and not simply dissipate as magics sometimes did. It wasn’t a simple spell to charm a rich customer, or frighten off a deadbeat.

One of her girls’ lives was at stake.

“A scab, yes, I see,” she said. “Certainly not a festering ulcer, raw and wet, where people from the east and the wild folk are at each others’ throats for everything from misunderstanding to murder. Certainly not giving people like my girls and the wild folk out there the only tools I can to prevent your boots from crushing them like at New Marvel.”

“That’s not how it is!” Jed screamed. “The wild folk are over! Spent! They only haven’t realized it yet! Just like the mages were over and spent! I’m doing what needs to be done, and if you don’t like my methods, you just need to think how many lives it’ll save! Every dead person under my orders is saving a dozen others!”

Scarlet quietly slid the enchanted round into her repeater and slowly worked the well-oiled action, bringing the hammer back and filling the chamber.

Then she twisted the knife. “And how many dozens do you have to save through murder, Mr. Edenburner, before the ghosts of New Marvel will let you sleep?”

With an inarticulate scream, Jed raised his pistol. It was out, away from his body, exposed. Just what Miss Scarlet had been waiting for. She took careful aim, whispered a last few words of magicks, and pulled the trigger.

True to its commands, the bullet was an avenger of accuracy, cutting through the wooden door like soft butter before impacting the hinge that held Edenburner’s break-action revolver together. The impact jolted the weapon from his hand, and as it sprang free the weapon parted in two, its ejector spitting all his bullets onto the floor. Before Jed could bring up his other gun, Miss Scarlet had kicked in the door with an Art-enhanced kick and a weak but well-placed spell of opening.

She swept Jed’s hand aside with a well-placed buttstroke with her repeater, and brought its barrel to rest square on his chest. The next round was a plain old lead slug, but that was all it had to be.

“The next shot will end you, Mr. Jedidiah Edenburner,” Miss Scarlet said. “So think very carefully about what you say next.”

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