io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. As soon as a month, we function a narrative from LIGHTSPEED’s present challenge. This month’s choice is “One Coronary heart, Misplaced and Discovered” by Kat Howard. You’ll be able to learn the story under or take heed to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s web site. Take pleasure in!
One Coronary heart, Misplaced and Discovered
I got here to the town to seek out an egg. A robin’s egg, to be exact, an oval of pale, good blue that echoed the spring sky. Inside, not a robin, however an emerald. Contained in the emerald, a wizard’s coronary heart.
He had determined he missed it, and he wished it again.
It was the same old kind of factor, or so he had assured me. His coronary heart taken out and saved for safekeeping, a spot the place his enemies—and definitely there have been many, jealous of his energy—would by no means assume to look. So properly hidden, actually, that he himself was now not fairly sure the place it was.
For somebody like me, nevertheless—his lips curved in what handed for a smile—properly, discovering it might be as simple as respiration. Simpler.
Wizards, on the entire, are usually not good at discovering issues. Excessive-level magic requires so many secrets and techniques that even peculiar issues fall from reminiscence like leaves in autumn.
I’m made from secrets and techniques, and so am simply unseen, unheard, unnoticed. I shed names and pasts like a serpent sheds pores and skin, sliding out of an previous life as soon as it now not matches, folding and storing it in case of want. My blood runs with recollections and my bones are palimpsests. What’s misplaced fills my lungs like air.
I’m excellent at discovering issues.
Standing on a nook, simply on the periphery of discover, I take a purple feather from a robin’s breast out of my pocket and maintain it flat on my palm, ready till the wind plucks it away from me. It twirls via currents and drafts, floating north till it falls.
North, then.
The feather’s path is a hook in my coronary heart, main me. I stroll previous brownstones, vibrant flowers in baskets adorning home windows and stoops. Previous chainlink rattled by basketballs, previous a dogwalker deftly managing six—no, seven—leashes. Previous forty-seven cents dropped from a careless hand, previous a home key half-buried by a three-day-old newspaper, previous a hoop that slid from a finger grown skinny. I stroll till the tingle within the bones of my ft that tells me I’m going in the proper course fades.
One other feather. A gust tears it from my hand and drops it down the steps of a subway cease. I shrug—I’ve discovered issues in much less doubtless locations—and begin after it.
As I step down into the stale warmth of the station, the tingle in my ft returns, then roars into an ache in my bones. Longing, set into marrow and joints. The wizard’s coronary heart isn’t right here, however it’s shut.
The platform is echoing and close to empty. An previous girl, wrapped in so many layers of clothes it’s inconceivable to inform the place they finish and she or he begins, reads futures in small bones scattered throughout the aged tile in entrance of her. Rats skitter alongside a wall, and a scorching wind blows the fading scent of rain into the tunnel.
The air on the platform shimmers like a mirror, and a practice breaks its floor. Grey like fog, with the identical roiling, mistlike high quality, and windowless. Soundless, too. No lights, so I can solely see just a few automobiles previous the primary—4, perhaps, or 5. Shadows obscure the top of the practice, making it inconceivable to see its size. The doorways on the automobile in entrance of me—and solely that automobile—open. The accompanying inhale pulls the robin’s feather inside. I observe. Because the doorways shut, I see the lady forged one other set of bones, an alternate future, and I’m wondering who she is studying these omens for.
Stepping via the doorways means stepping via an unseen barrier as properly, the sharp electrical energy of magic elevating the hair on my arms and the again of my neck. The ache of discovering in my bones crescendos and pops, and the ache is changed by a hollowness like nothing I’ve felt earlier than. Trying round, I perceive why.
Below different circumstances, the practice’s inside itself might need been the factor that caught my consideration. It was exceedingly removed from the customary subway inside of dingy flooring and orange and yellow plastic seats, embellished alongside the partitions with maps of practice traces and advertisements for cosmetic surgery behind graffitied covers.
As a substitute, there hung ornate brass fixtures and purple wallpaper, the lights not fluorescents however candle-lit sconces, and the seats carved picket benches, warmed by beeswax polish, that may have had a former residence in a church.
After which: tables, cabinets, hooks. Filled with what initially appeared like a scatter of commonplace issues. A wide range of briefcases, purses, tote luggage. Battered leather-based, torn material, misprinted designer logos and knock-off prints subsequent to their originals, ostrich and alligator pores and skin purses with tiny locks holding them closed. A drawstring sack, knotted on the prime, that shimmers like eelskin and strikes as if one thing could be quietly decomposing within it. Taking a look at it makes me really feel sick to my abdomen, makes my tooth really feel uninteresting and electrical with wrongness.
Not eelskin then. One thing nonetheless partially alive, that shouldn’t have been. One thing even worse inside. Magic isn’t all the time—isn’t even usually—as benign as glowing jewels hidden inside pretty chook’s eggs.
Then there are the sneakers. Filthy flip-flops, laceless sneakers, elegant red-soled stilettos. One that appears like shattered glass, bloodstained within the heel. Principally singles, however some in matched pairs. I decide one in all them up—a black sandal, one strap damaged—and instantly want I hadn’t. A picture flashes via my head of a lady, working. Her heel, this heel, caught in a grate. Shoving palms. Then nothing however a scream and a damaged sandal.
I drop the shoe, and scrub my palms towards my legs, understanding the picture, the horror, will linger however wishing I may cleanse myself of it anyway.
I’m nearly sure now what this place is, this practice stuffed with issues misplaced, deserted, forgotten. Every thing that goes lacking winds up someplace, misplaced then discovered. And if nobody goes searching for them, issues have a tendency to seek out locations for themselves.
The door between the automobiles slides open. I step via.
And I cease.
“My title is Tanis.” A lady, with a voice like incense and smoke. She is over six ft tall and vaguely serpentine, a lot in order that the precise snake—iridescent navy, and biting its personal tail—that she wears as a necklace appears pure, relatively than unusual. A group of rings sparkle on her palms, diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires in rainbow, a minimum of two per finger, and her costume is as mirrored and shimmering because the practice itself. “Might you discover what has been misplaced.” She gestures, inviting me in. Inviting me to look.
After all I do. How can I not?
Close to the door I had simply walked via was a pile of eggs resting in a shallow iridescent bowl. Every was massive sufficient to fill my hand—not that I used to be planning on selecting one up, not after what I had seen once I picked up the shoe—and translucent. They odor of seawrack. Inside every, a mermaid—an precise mermaid—pores and skin like the within of an oyster shell, lay curled. Sleeping, perhaps, or ready to be born. I stare, questioning if they’re lonely, so far-off from any ocean, and I hope that somebody will discover them and convey them residence.
A jar of tooth rattles and jumps in a cupboard. Some look human in origin, and a few emphatically don’t. On the wall, a hat trimmed in phoenix feathers, nonetheless burning. The flames don’t eat the feathers and the smoke smells like cinnamon and amber. Subsequent to the hat, a stack of three golden apples, contemporary and honey-sweet. Just under the apples, faceted emerald scarabs stroll slowly throughout the diamond sand of a glass-walled cage.
I hint their shapes within the air with my palms, reaching however not fairly touching. So many misplaced issues, gathered like a lump in a throat.
Tanis stands subsequent to me, and raises her hand to the perimeters of the burning feathers. The flames prompt the jewels she wears. Her sleeve falls again, exhibiting an arm tattooed in bees. They transfer on her pores and skin, weaving and delivering a dance that reveals the way in which to one thing solely they know.
“Will you be part of me in a cup of tea?” she asks.
“I’d like that, thanks.”
There’s a sudden warmth, as if the necklace snake has a dragon cousin someplace on the practice automobile, and the underside of a copper cauldron hanging off the wall reverse us glows heat. Steam, aromatic with cardamom, and clove, and one thing deeper, rises from the liquid inside.
“Maybe some honey? I preserve my very own apiary. The bees appear to seek out the practice enjoyable.” She lifts a deep inexperienced curtain behind her, revealing a wax body of bees. I can’t inform whether or not they look notably relaxed or not, however I conform to strive the honey regardless. It’s pink-tinged, a blush caught in a jar.
Tanis pours, then raises her glass: “To what has been misplaced, and what’s but to be discovered.”
I drink.
Photographs fill my head because the style of honey and salt fills my mouth.
Tanis, standing alone in a discipline, arms outstretched. The ghosts of bees, translucent and crystalline, sinking into her pores and skin, one after the other. As they do, their recollections of air and flight additionally sink into her pores and skin after which into her self. My very own pores and skin buzzes with a not-unpleasant phantom buzzing.
I drink once more.
A practice, weaving snake-like via trackless locations—under the ocean and above the clouds, within the areas between shadows, and I really feel its path under my ft. Toes that really feel like wheels, like rails of iron. The practice’s coronary heart burns like a star in a sapphire, like a dwelling coal.
Another sip.
The style of honey darker this time, an iron shadow beneath the sweetness. Reminiscences of instances that I’ve been misplaced. Not from myself, however from others. A purposeful hiding within the shadows, the corners, the secure areas. Praying my breath, my heartbeat could be quiet sufficient to not betray me, the ache of discovering throbbing in my bones as I want that I may discover the factor that can finish it, to chop the flaw out of my coronary heart and free myself from issues just like the instructions of wizards.
“I see,” Tanis says as I flip my empty cup over, and set it on its saucer. “Include me, please.”
I observe her via a door, and right into a automobile lined with maps. Not simply lined with—full of. Charts on tables and atlases stacked in tottering heaps and globes spinning in the identical orbits as orreries. Not of the type of areas that you just name up in your GPS, however maps of locations that by no means had been, maps with previous borders, maps to seek out the capital metropolis of drowned Ys and the bounds of Camelot, maps that might lead you to the highest of Mount Qaf, and to the Axis Mundi.
There are home windows on this automobile, although I quickly cease making an attempt to look via them. Every holds a unique view—right here a forest, stuffed with historic, knotted timber; and there a metropolis, modern glass, and all underwater; and subsequent a palace of some type, purple domed roofs vibrant like rubies within the solar. Home windows to all over the place and anyplace, the continually altering view dizzying.
“The place would you go?” Tanis asks. “Should you may select anyplace. To lose your self. Or, maybe, to seek out your self.”
I do look via the home windows then, watching every scene for so long as it lasts, ready for the sense of “discovered” to settle into my joints. I flip via maps, hover my finger over borders. The snake raises its head from Tanis’ neck and watches.
“The practice,” I say, considering of that burning sapphire coronary heart. “May the practice select for me?”
“It may. We are going to make you a map of want.” Tanis opens a protracted, slender drawer in a mirrored cupboard that I’d swear wasn’t there after we first walked into the practice automobile. She kinds via the contents, then units a clean piece of worn parchment on the cupboard’s prime. I can see the shadows of previous drawings and phrases scraped from its floor.
“Set your left hand within the heart.”
I do. The snake unwinds from her neck, slithers throughout the parchment to my hand, and strikes, fangs sinking into my wrist. Quick as breath, they withdraw, spattering my blood throughout the parchment.
“What’s the place you’re searching for?” Tanis asks. “Know the reality of it in your coronary heart.”
My blood strikes throughout the parchment. I felt dizzy, watching it. Then it stops. Settles into traces. A map. The snake curves round it as soon as, twice, thrice, then winds its method again up Tanis’ arm and to her throat.
The practice pauses, shivers, turns. I really feel a eager for the place on the map in my bones.
“As a thanks, I received’t ask for the return of the wizard’s coronary heart you put on in your finger,” I say, smiling on the largest of emerald rings she wears.
Tanis laughs, gold and vibrant as honey. “He is aware of very properly the place it’s. He’s simply afraid to ask for it himself.”
“Then he most likely shouldn’t have it again,” I say.
She smiles, and the pictures within the practice’s home windows sluggish, then coalesce, all exhibiting the identical view because the practice glides to a cease.
The doorways open. “Thanks,” I say.
I step off the practice, into a spot I’ve by no means seen earlier than. I’m misplaced.
However there isn’t a answering ache of discovering in my bones, no must forged feathers for paths or search winds for instructions. No tingle in my ft that units the sample for my steps. Not misplaced, then: My very own.
In regards to the Writer
Kat Howard is a author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror who lives and writes in Minnesota. Her novella, The Finish of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was one in all NPR’s finest books of 2014, and her debut novel, Roses and Rot, was a finalist for the Locus Award for Finest First Novel. An Unkindness of Magicians was named a finest e book of 2017 by NPR, and received a 2018 Alex Award. Her quick fiction assortment, A Cathedral of Fantasy and Bone, collects work that has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, carried out as a part of Chosen Shorts, and anthologized in 12 months’s Finest and Better of volumes. She was the author for the primary 18 problems with The Books of Magic, a part of DC Comics’ Sandman Universe. Her subsequent novel, A Sleight of Shadows, the sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians, was printed in April 2023. Yow will discover her @KatwithSword on Twitter and on Instagram. She talks about books at Epigraph to Epilogue.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the Might 2023 challenge, which additionally options work by Natalia Theodoridou, Deborah L. Davitt, Izzy Wasserstein, Wole Talabi, Sharang Biswas, S.L. Harris, Timothy Mudie, and extra. You’ll be able to anticipate this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire challenge proper now in handy book format for simply $3.99, or subscribe to the book version right here.
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