Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (11 page)

I’ve always been a skinny lad, and quick-witted to boot, so I leaps over the embers, which were dying then anyhow, and scramble after Tom. It’s my chance to get to Fairyland, I figure, and old dad, he’d always said, grab opportunities as they presents themselves.

If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have kept sitting there and waved Tom on his journey. It’s Fairyland, sure enough, but it’s a cat’s notion of Fairyland. Maybe there’s one for all the creatures, horses and rats and huntin’ dogs. But their notion here of entertainment is chasing mice, the whole kit and court does it for hours on a time, and then they drink cream and eat sardines. I’d give my soul for an honest pint of beer.

The women, aye, they’re pretty enough, but they’ll claw you to death sure as eagles fly, and they stink, more to the point. They reek of musk and blood, and in the evenings they all sit around grooming each other and purring, an unsettling sound that unmans me whenever I hear it.

King of Cats, be-damned. I’d search for some other Fairyland, but where might I end up? A fish’s land, where it’s never warm nor dry, or a beetle’s, perhaps. At least I have my fireside here, with old Tom cleaning my ears while I wait for some new story to set me free.

“
Up the Chimney” was written for a flash fiction contest held by EscapePod. It did not win by popular vote, but editor Stephen Eley did purchase it for a podcast and it later appeared online in the
Postcards from
series.

I’ve always been fascinated by the folk story in which a man recounts having seen an odd funeral the night before. At the end of it, whatever cat is nearby raises its head, says, “Then I’m the King of Cats!” and vanishes away. Here I allowed the cat to take someone with him, a scullery lad who is, by this point in the story, heartily tired of a cat’s vision of Paradise.

The Silent Familiar

The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183—youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human—he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another—even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own.

"Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to that familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too pleased with herself. A pair of alabaster candelabra sheltered her in a thicket of gilt spirals, and a stuffed salmon, labeled “First Prize—Thornstone Village Centennial Celebration,” regarded her with a sour gaze.

“
Master,” she said, blinking luminous eyes. “Have I not served you well?”

“
For the most part,” he admitted.

She stayed silent, so after a pause, he said, “Yes, invariably, Olivia. But who will hold your loyalty, that egg or I?”

“
Both,” she said and stoked her scaled cheek along the egg’s smooth surface. “But I will never value it higher than my service to you.”

Wizards’ familiars are unnatural creatures. Some are much like any other animal: a cat, perhaps, with black fur, a droop-winged crow, or a snake with emerald scales. Others look less innocuous and more fantastical—homunculi and tiny, perfect dragons like Olivia, or shaggy-warted mandrake plants. Given this, it is surprising that two of them had managed to have compatible body parts, let alone produce an offspring. And yet, three months after a purely platonic sojourn of Niccolo with a sorceress whose library was vast enough to entice all sorts of other mages to her door, this had happened. Niccolo had been researching how the gods manifested themselves, and the library tomes had been unfamiliar enough to hold all his attention. Enrapt in ancient texts, he had overlooked Olivia’s activities.

Niccolo scowled at her. “Do you intend to make a habit of this?” he demanded.

“
Oh, I don’t know,” Olivia said absently. “I didn’t like the last part, the laying. The getting ready to lay, though…”

Niccolo put up his hand. “I do
not
want to know.” He turned away. “How long till it hatches?”

“
I don’t know,” Olivia said. “I’ve never done this.” She crooned deep in her throat, an unsettling noise Niccolo had never heard her make before.

Grumbling, he stalked out. It’s probably not even viable, he thought. How long would Olivia fool herself into believing it would hatch? When he had created her, coaxing her winged form from a malachite shard, a bit of bone, and a lizard’s scale, he had endowed her with a sardonic wit and a capability for banter—requisites for any wizard’s familiar. But he had always prided himself that Olivia was smarter than most. Smarter than this deluded maternal ambition would seem to indicate.

Had he erred when making her? Familiars were repositories for wizards’ emotions, one of the means by which they stripped away their humanity and became immortal. Perhaps he’d put too
much
in her, though. He considered thoughts of a new familiar, but reluctantly. At times, when Olivia rested on his shoulder or curled in his lap, he felt the struggle of his emotions, the desire to pet her like a cat warring with a shrinking away, a don’t-touch-me shudder. He was still young for a wizard, still trying to learn what magic meant. Still trying to become more than human.

He sighed. After a few months, he’d try to get Olivia to see reason and abandon her effort.

Three months later, Olivia still spent most waking hours curled around her egg, drowsy contentment evident in the set of her wings. Niccolo had resigned himself to her absent-mindedness. He had been working on a set of experiments involving
aqua vitæ
and a supposed phoenix feather, coaxing bits of down away from the shaft. He hoped to evoke fiery gold, but so far all he had was soggy fluff.

He looked up from the alembic on his worktable as Olivia chirped.

“
I’ve told you before, don’t make noises while I’m…” he began, but she ignored him.

“
It’s hatching! It’s hatching!” She unwrapped herself, backed away from the egg, eying it. “What do I do?”

“
It’s your egg!”

“
I’ve never done this before!”

They both gazed in fascination as the egg wobbled.

“
Should I get some hot water?” Niccolo said.

“
What are you planning on doing, cooking it?”

“
They always seem to fetch hot water for babies.”

The egg rocked back and forth as its occupant shifted.

“
Maybe it can’t get out,” Olivia worried. “Should I help it?”

“
Give it time,” Niccolo said.

They stared as though mesmerized. The egg tipped, tottered… toppled from the mantelpiece. Olivia shrieked even as Niccolo dove for it, his heart almost stopping.

The egg shattered in his hands and what he held there almost made him drop it. For an instant he thought it dead. Then the tiny lizard mewled and Olivia’s wings were fluttering in his face even as he tried to set the infant down. Chaos reigned for a moment before Olivia was curled around her offspring while Niccolo crouched on his knees, ignoring the arthritic twinges.

The baby was, despite all of Niccolo’s thoughts about mutants and monstrosities, perfect. Like Olivia, it was a miniature dragon’s form, with frilled, lacey wings that stretched out now, trembling, to dry. Glistening amniotic fluid hung in thick strands from them.

Niccolo took a damp cloth and tenderly cleaned the wings as Olivia fussed and twined around his hands.

“
You did well, Olivia,” he admitted, looking down at her child. “You did well.”

Almost all wizards have hobbies, and they refuse to taint these grand obsessions with magic. Niccolo’s was fishing. He knew every trout stream in the forest surrounding his retreat, and his favorite was an unnamed brook that made its way through beech groves and sandy sloughs, past a stand of willows whose roots had gnawed away at the bank, creating holes and riddles where trout might lurk in the hot afternoons, waiting for evening. A fallen tree formed a bench where Niccolo could sit, his creel beside him lined with fresh moss and ready to hold his catch.

He threaded his rod and attached a caddis fly lure Olivia had helped him create. He wasn’t sure that using her to assist didn’t count as magic, but his fingers shook, and she was still as deft and nimble-clawed as when he had first created her almost a century ago. The lure’s underbelly was yellow as daffodils and its wings were bits of brown feather. Deep in its guts was the hook, barbed to catch hold of a trout’s tender mouth and let Niccolo coax it ashore.

Hours passed as he cast and drowsed, waiting with the patience only a fisherman knows. A few times he felt the tentative twitch of the hook and paused but the trout were wary and skittish that day. With the coming of dusk, he knew, though, they would grow hungry and strike hard at the insects lighting on the water, his lure whirling among them.

His purpose was not to catch fish, but to think. He contemplated Olivia. Every wizard needs a familiar, like a second voice speaking the things that she or he has left behind, the barbs and commonplace facts of life that a wizard tries to divest themselves of in the quest for immortality.

Familiars were like second souls, advice you could trust. You could make a familiar, as Niccolo had, and place bits of yourself in it, but it was hard. Few had accomplished it, and most wizards relied on familiars already fit to speak. Ravens were popular, and a line of talking cats in Loudontown had furnished familiars for the wizards’ school there for decades.

Talking. That was what distinguished familiars from most animals, aside from various prophetic creatures. It worried Niccolo that the offspring, which Olivia had named Hrist, had yet to speak. Was it possible that—unlike its parents—it lacked intelligence? As the months passed, he had watched it, trying to determine what was passing through its mind. It seemed to respond to words, to “no” and “dinner” and such, but after all—a well-trained hound might do as much. Had Hrist lapsed to an animal’s natural state, lacking the spark that his parents had possessed?

Olivia rejected this notion when Niccolo proposed it to her that night over a dinner of fresh-caught trout and bread from the nearby village.

“
Hrist is as smart as you or I,” she said indignantly. “Perhaps even more so, in your case.” She looked over at Hrist.

By now, the winged lizard extended six inches from snout to tail, half his mother’s size. He lay on the windowsill in the sun, regarding his reflection in the dust-flecked glass with a placid gaze.

“
Indeed,” Niccolo said dubiously.

Hrist swiveled his head, looked Niccolo in the eye, and nodded once.

Niccolo blinked, astonished.

“
If he can understand us, why can’t he reply, Olivia?” he said.

Olivia’s tail swished. “He can’t talk,” she said.

“
You and his father both have fully formed—perhaps even more so, in
your
case—vocal apparati. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t.”

Of course, there was no reason why Hrist should exist in the first place, Niccolo thought, but Olivia would become even more furious if he said that.

And Hrist was, Niccolo admitted, a charming little creature. He loved to hunt and would spend hours in the vegetable garden, haunting the zucchini and pepper plants in order to eat squash vine borers and yellow and black striped cucumber beetles.

As the little dragon grew, Niccolo worked at teaching Hrist how to write instead. The dragonling quickly learned, using his long tail much like a ink pen, dipping it with a sinuous twist in the inkwell and employing the pointed tip to scrawl on parchment. He shared his mother’s quick and sometimes sardonic wit, but his observations were written out in a meticulous, careful hand.

He took to reading like a duck to water, and Niccolo would find him draped over a volume, carefully scanning the words and turning the pages with his flexible, almost prehensile tail.

“
I don’t know why I can’t talk,” he wrote when Niccolo questioned him. “I try to speak and nothing comes out but air.”

He could make noises, the hisses and chirps and rumbles that Olivia regularly engaged in, which comforted Niccolo somewhat. But try as he might, he could not give his familiar’s child a voice.