A Trade of Venom

A Trade of Venom
by
Bobby Derie

In the year that the mermaids cries were heard over the Western Ocean, so that all the world knew of the passing of the last king of the sea, when his empire was fought over and divided by his generals because he had no sons, the collector of cantrips found himself in the forest of Tothamnon. Along a certain beach, he knew, washed ashore the black shells of a species of conch that lived in the drowned cities off the coast, and he had read in the histories how those cities had once been famed for their necromancies, and that the echoes of its forgotten spells could still be heard in the shells of those sea creatures that lived in the ruins, which were slowly being overtaken by coral and oyster, so that octopuses crept though its barren treasuries, and sharks swam through its desolate halls, and fronds of sea-grass waved where once roof-gardens had stood, and only barnacled skeletons remained in its jails and dungeons, the keys to their cells corroded masses of blackened silver.

The collector of cantrips walked over this beach, was was strange in that the black sand was replaced by a rainbow of colored glass, red-orange, green-grey, yellow, blue-white, and smoky black, which had once been the shattered windows of those sunken cities, but time and tides had washed them smooth and round. It was early, with the sun but a promise on the horizon, and the tide was yet high, leaving its treasures on that strange beach. Yet as the collector soon saw, he was not alone.

Ahead of him, carrying a clutch of lustrous black conch shells in a net woven of hair - black, blonde, and brunette - was a dark woman dressed something like a fishwife. Yet her skirt was all the warty leather of toad-skins, sewn together, in her unruly hair hissed tiny serpents that whispered and reared as the collector's footsteps came *tink, tink* on the glass, and between her pendulous and ample breasts hung a blue bottle topped with a stone cap in the shape of a terrible octopus. Dead wasps decorated her fingers, their stingers held outwards on rings of copper that left the fingers beneath them green, and about her shoulders hung a cape of leaves and nettles, every thorn and spike of which carried some minor malevolence.

The collector halted a few arm-lengths from the poison-witch, and giving a cordial bow at the waist, bid her good day. In response she opened her mouth, revealing a gaping maw with graying gums around teeth stained black, but only the barest, shriveled stump of a tongue. He made a few signs in the languages he knew, but she only shut her mouth and shook her head, looking at him strangely. Finally, he resorted to pointing to a black shell that lay on the ground between them, and mimed placing it up to his ear.

At that, the poison-witch nodded, the snakes in her hair bobbing their tiny heads in time with her, but held up her left hand, palm towards the collector, with two fingers raised. The collector nodded, and fetched forth his book of cantrips, paging through them to consider what spells he would trade.

As he paged through the book, the poison-witch laid down her net, and fetched forth chunks of driftwood from the beach, stacking them together before him. From some hidden pocket she drew forth a lidded horn, and opening the lid he saw a burning coal nestled there among dried sea grass, and with care she blew on that coal, and coaxed it with pulling gestures, until tiny ribbons of flame licked out to touch the driftwood. In time it blazed to life as a bluish flame, for which the collector was grateful, for the sun was still but a grey blob on the horizon, and the poison-witch carefully put her coal-horn away.

She watched his face intently, and finally he looked up and met her gaze across the fire.

"There is a wordless song, which the sharkmaids sing, which summons forth the blood-eels while they are sleeping, so that the sharkmaids can take their venom, which keeps the blood from coagulating, and they paint it on their knives. It is in a strange scale, but I can teach it to you."

The poison-witch closed her eyes and shook her head. So the collector tried again.

"The assassins of the Opal Cities have long used a charm drawn on their leaden blades; when they strike a wound the edges break and leave slivers in the wound, which wiggles inwards away from the surgeon's knife. So the victim is doomed to a long and debilitating illness before death."

In answer, she brought forth her own blade, a well-carved bone-knife with not much of an edge, but a sharp point. He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. "No, I don't think it will work on that." So he flipped a few more pages and tried again.

"The Way of the Toad," he said at last, "is practiced by a certain sect, who use the toxins in toad-skins to make a kind of paste, which they apply to their skins to deaden the nerves. In this way they may train harder than others, as they feel less pain from blows, and their skin grows tough as elephant-hide. Although I must warn you, as the one who told me this did, that prolonged use can cause you to loose the feeling permanently."

At this, the poison-witch seemed to consider, but at last she nodded. Then she held up her hand again, with two fingers raised, and lowered one. The collector of cantrips folded his book and put it away. Then from his belt, he took forth a certain charm. It was ivory, a snake coiled about a coconut, the scales of one blending into the other, and held on a string of yellow silk.

"In the district of Vhargardan, this charm is used to assist in suicide. Placed in a drink of water, even brackish water, the water becomes sweet, like coconut water - but too much of it in a day, and the bowels will fail, the kidneys will fail, and a lingering death will occur."

The poison-witch seemed to hesitate, so the collector reached forth around his neck, and pulled forth an amulet of bone capped at either end with bone, with a bead of blue glass set in the cylinder like a window.

"A small demon lives in this house, and stares out at the world through the glass glass," he said, "I have never learned its true name, but if you feed it blood or milk you may befriend it. He is a minor demon, but he claims to know the name of every poison there is, and the signs and symptoms of their poisoning. I do not know the truth of it, but so far he has never been wrong when I asked him about such matters."

At this, the poison-witch gave a toothy smile, and he handed the amulet over to her, which she immediately strung around her own neck, and he began to copy forth the recipe for the toad-paste. By then the sun had begun to rise, and cast its blazing reflection on the great sea, so in the shallowest waters the collector could just make out the sunken towers of a city.

From the collection of black conches in her sack, she drew forth a large and beautiful one, all the shades of black from flashing coal to polished onyx, and turning it over revealed the horror of legs and muscle that lived within. With a practiced twist of her bone knife, she evaded those tiny yet terrible claws, and in a work of a minute had removed the horror entirely from the shell, and chopped it into three pieces - the claws of which she never touched with her bare hand, but secreted carefully in a pouch. The collector watched all the while, missing nothing of her technique. The meat she wrapped in seaweed and lay near the fire to cook.

At last the meal was ready, and the collector had copied out the recipe, and all was done. They did not shake hands, but they bowed respectfully to each other, and the poison-witch took her leave, heading up the beach to the forest of Tothamnon.

The collector of cantrips, for his part, sat on the beach with pen and ink and paper at hand, and with the other brought the now-empty black conch shell up to his ear. Closing his eyes, he listened intently for the rarity he had traded for.

###

An Unpublishable Comic

The Dolls of Ash

The Dolls of Ash
by
Bobby Derie

When the fire mountains woke

Burning ash fell as rain from the sky

So all the people burned

Their houses and animals burned

The sky was dark for days

There was no more day or night

Time was measured only by the falling ash

Which accumulated in great drifts

When the sun came out once more

It was pale and cold

The clouds did not leave the sky

The people huddled around the warm waters

Which bled from the fire mountains

They carried the fire with them in horns

As they traveled farther and farther for food

The Ash-Mother rose up to command the people

Though she was young

The elders were all dead

Except for the Well-Finder

Who had drunk too much of strange waters

The Ash-Mother was strong

Fleet with blessing and curses

She had studied the old ways and made them new again

The old city was torn down and made new again

The ash was pressed into bricks

The bricks were laid and mortared

The walls grew higher and stronger than before

All as the Ash-Mother said

The water was made to flow in the channels

The plants were burned for their salt

The meat was cured with the salt

The fruit was cured with the salt

They ate the salty food for every meal

Washed down with sweet water

For those who had so little for so long

It was good

It was enough

In the days of the Ash-Mother

The dead lived with the living

In their homes

She made of them dolls of clay and ash

She dried their flesh with fire and salt

She plaited their hair and blackened their skin with ointments

They smelled of smoke and sweet herbs

They sat on stools and shelves

They chased away bad spirits

So the Ash-Mother said

No one spoke against her

Not for long

In days and moons the Ash-Mother ruled long

Always the first to tend the fire

Always the first to start the rites

Always the first to taste the grey salt

Bellies swelled after the harvest-rite

Well-Finder spoke a prophecy

Or perhaps a curse

Spat from cracked and bleeding lips

No more to the Ash-Mother

Her daughter was growing in the belly of another

Then Ash-Mother spoke

The stores of salt-meat and salt-fruit were not enough

The sweet water was not enough

No children could be born to the people

Not yet

She gave to the women the bitter herb

She watched them swallow it

Those who would not swallow had their teeth broken

Those who would not swallow had their hair torn

Those who would not swallow had the bitter herb forced between their lips

The children were born dead

The women dared not wail

Ash-Mother dried and cleaned them

Ash-Mother made them as dolls

That the women could carry them around

The Well-Finder was found drowned

All agreed out loud he had drunk too much of the strange waters

All agreed in silence

Ash-Mother grew fat

Her belly swelled

She did not eat the bitter herb

The women watched her

Carrying their dolls

It was hard on Ash-Mother

The women watched but did not help her

Nor would she ask for help

When the time came

Ash-Mother screamed

The women came forward

With their sharp knives

The men stayed in their hut

It was not for them

They heard the screams

For three nights

The Ash-Mother died

Each woman of the people cut a piece from her

They covered it with clay and dried it with fire

They hung the amulets about the necks of their dolls

In this way

Some thought their children would live again

It was not so.

###

The Dick of Death, Part 1

The Dick of Death
by
Bobby Derie

The clanging demon interrupted a valuable experiment I was conducting regarding the ability of to absorb whiskey through the skin. As I sputtered and gasped for air, I determined that the results were inconclusive and grabbed for the receiver. It fell off the hook with a clatter, and I growled loudly enough for the party on the other end to hear me. It also woke the office cat, and Little Richard sauntered over and began to lick the medicinal firewater off my face with gusto. In the battle between my five-o'clock shadow and his sandpaper tongue, I might not even have to shave.

"Got a stiff one for you, Frank." The tinny ghost of the line growled. "Wooburn Plaza. Had to seal off Tombstone Ave. Bastard looks like he was shot out of a cannon. Nothing but a smear."

I growled once for acceptance and hung up.

Wooburn Plaza was the brainchild of a generous artistic grant aimed at the collapse of the architect market, coupled with a kickback scheme that would make Tammany Hall blush. It was art deco through the lens of a speed-freak, a tomorrowland stripped through a wind tunnel full of sharp curves and edges, built by a no-bid contractor to strict union rules. They'd torn down a whole city block of ancient red brick and rebuilt it out of concrete, steel, and the mouldering bodies of stoolies and whores. The mob had treated it as the biggest dumpspot on the planet, and more than one young Turk with more balls than brains, or a moll who thought her tits let her mouth walk away with anything, had ended up taking a walk down Wooburn and staying far longer than they intended.

The smear was along Tombstone Ave, right in front the tomb of Genevieve. I took off my hat and tried not to stare at the half-equestrian figures in marble guarding her final resting place. No one could say they were anatomically accurate, but only because if human males were proportioned that way no bride would live out their honeymoon. I kept my eyes on the words and tried not to feel inadequate standing in their shadow, but stupid tears came anyway. It was what she would have wanted.

Somewhere up above, where the smog damned the angels for sending them to hell, the watchtower bonged.

I smelt Grisworld before I saw or heard him; like a burning camel dipped in rubbing alcohol. He never smoked less than two Pall Malls at a time, unless he was sleeping, when his secretary would come by every hour and change out the one still burning hanging from his lip. I forced myself away from Genevieve's tomb to look at the remains.

A streak of blood and viscera ran the length of the ave, never more than about a foot wide, wider toward the middle and trailing perceptibly along the edges, maybe fifty or sixty feet long. Bits and pieces were scattered here and there with no particular pattern. I bent down and took a closer look at the concrete. Like a lot of Wooburn, it was porous and rough, like pumice. I'd expected the blood to pool, but all along the smear the edges were filled up with meat, skin, and gristle.

"He wasn't shot out of a cannon," I barked at Griswold. He stopped, eyes intense and bloodshot from whatever he was on, cigarettes flaring as he took a double-drag. "The poor bastard was scraped."

To Be Continued