ISFDB links: #250, #251, #252, #253

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank #250-251, #252-253
Richard Horton, Locus #250
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews #250, #250, #251, #252, #253
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures #250, #251, #252, #253
Chuck Rothman, Rebecca DeVendra (2), Stephanie Wexler, Tangent Online #250, #251, #252, #253
Various, Goodreads #250, #251, #252, #253

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Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews

Fiction:
#250
The Thought That Counts • novelette by Tom Holt [as by K. J. Parker] ∗∗∗
An Account of the Madness of the Magistrate, Chengdhu Village • short story by Richard Parks ∗∗∗
Silence in Blue Glass • novelette by Margaret Ronald ∗∗
Angry Kings • novelette by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam ∗

#251
The Examination Cloth • short story by Jonathan Edelstein ∗
The Root Cellar • short story by Maria Haskins ∗

#252
The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars • short story by A. J. Fitzwater ∗
The Ghostpotion Games • short story by Christian K. Martinez ∗

#253
A Tale of Woe • novelette by P. Djèlí Clark ∗∗
The Weaver and the Snake • short story by Blaine Vitallo ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
#251
Subscription Drive • editorial
All
Legendary Passage • cover by Jereme Peabody

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As these four issues use variants of the same cover I’ve combined them together into a single review.
There is a short editorial note (the first I’ve ever seen) at the start of #250 that promotes a Subscription Drive:

From now until May 11, buy a BCS ebook subscription or renew your existing subscription and you’ll help unlock our drive goals. BCS has a very high word-count limit for submissions, 14,000 words—a stretch goal unlocked by you, our subscribers, in our Subscription Drive last year. With your help, we’ll raise it even higher this year. At 50 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 15,000 words. At 100 new/renewing subscribers, we’ll raise it to 16,000; at 200, we’ll raise it to 18,000; at 250, we’ll raise it to 20,000 words!

I hope they get their 250 subscribers: apart from the fact that this publication deserves support, one of the magazine’s shortcomings is its tendency to publish fragmentary or inconclusive work. This is less of a problem at longer lengths. That said, judging by the quality of the line and copy editing in some of the following stories, they should perhaps use any extra money on that.

Issue #250 is also slightly different in that it is a “special double issue” and so has four stories. The first of these is The Thought That Counts by Tom Holt, which is about a not entirely agreeable mage who is on the run. We first meet him in a coach where he is talking to a seemingly naïve young woman who is going to town to become a portrait painter:

“…wanted me to marry Logo the tanner. He’s got a beautiful home, she said, and you soon get used to the smell. Mother, I said, I don’t want to get used to the smell. I don’t ever want to be the sort of person who doesn’t notice the stink of sheep’s brains. She just looked at me. That’s when I knew I had to leave.”
I decided I didn’t like her mother. Priorities all wrong. Egging her on to marry defenceless tanners when she should have been teaching her not to talk to strange men in stagecoaches. Which raises the incidental question; am I a strange man? I guess, on balance, yes. Decide for yourself.  p. 3

Months pass, and he next sees her in court, accused of causing the deaths of several people whose portrait she has painted. Among the mage’s many skills is his knowledge of legal matters, so he impulsively volunteers to defend her, and she is later acquitted.
The story then flashbacks to the narrator’s student days and the struggles he had coming to terms with his poor academic performance. At one point he stands on a bridge wondering whether to jump when a woman artist who he has seen around the university starts talking to him. He later poses for her, and eventually falls in love, for a while at least.
These two strands cleverly dovetail at the end, where our slightly unpleasant narrator gets his comeuppance. The story is expertly and engagingly told, but the talent at work here masks, I think, a slightly unlikely plot. Still, it is an entertaining piece.
An Account of the Madness of the Magistrate, Chengdhu Village by Richard Parks opens with Mistress Jing and Mei Li, a snake devil in human form, practicing their magic when they are interrupted by the arrival of Jing’s father. He has been sent by the province Governor to assist the local magistrate, but the latter appears insane:

 “He seems a perfectly healthy young man and insists that he is perfectly fine and doesn’t understand what the Governor was talking about. Then he poured a glass of wine over his head and ordered his Chief Eunuch to perform and characterize the Eight Tenets of Kong Fuzi as a peasant work song. The man failed, probably because he didn’t know any peasant work songs.”
“What happened then?” Mei Li asked.
Father sighed. “The magistrate ordered the eunuch to think about what he had done and then sent him to his room. For the eunuch’s sake I hope the Magistrate doesn’t expect a report on his conclusions in the morning.”  p. 47-48

Jing and Mei Li sneak across the rooftops that evening to observe the governor, and when they see him crying they suspect a fox spirit is involved. The next day the father takes the pair to entertain the man, and examine him further. Mei Li concludes he may be not be possessed by a fox spirit but is actually a fox in human form (a problematical situation which will require them to kill him).
They are later invited (spoiler) to a meeting with the fox/magistrate, which they suspect is an ambush, but discover the fox actually wants to die. Being in human form is driving him insane, but he cannot revert to his normal form as he is under a compulsion placed upon him by the man who he replaced, a friend of his who wanted recognition but died prematurely.
The three arrange a funeral to lay the friend’s ghost to rest, and arrange a cover story for the fox’s later disappearance.
A pleasant Chinese fantasy.
Silence in Blue Glass by Margaret Ronald gets off to an intriguing start with the narrator, an injured veteran of a magical war, receiving an invitation to a dinner party from his semi-estranged brother. At the latter’s house he meets a number of guests: Georgina and her brother Quinn, who run a mining business, a kobold called Mieni, who the narrator knows (to the surprise of his brother), and, finally, another couple, Jeremiah and his young wife Anastasia.
Throughout the dinner party various things become clear: this is a business meeting to see how Georgina’s family and Mieki’s people can co-operate in a mining enterprise; Jeremiah and Georgina are old lovers (and flirt throughout the party); and there are also mentions of “episodes” the narrator has that cause him to bleed smoke. During the meal itself Mieni brings out a cobalt blue globe which magically produces various forms of silence, between people, in a certain direction, etc.
Eventually they all retire.
This section is entertaining enough but, after an interesting start, the story begins to drag, something that is brought into even starker relief when Georgina (spoiler) is found dead the next morning. Mieni takes charge, performs a brief investigation (the blue globe of silence was used to cover the sounds of the crime), and soon announces who the culprit is (all this in about half the wordage used to describe the dinner party). This is all rather perfunctory, and I didn’t find the culprit’s motivation credible. The story has some good world-building and characterisation, though.
Noted in passing: there is a printing error in the PDF version of this issue—after the end of this story, most of the previous tale is repeated (p. 114 to p. 147).
Angry Kings by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam is a fantasy about a woman who, having earlier left the cruel king who is her father, returns with his ghost and attempts to reunite it with his body. Most of the story is a flashback to the period between these two points in time.
There is something about Stufflebeam’s style that makes it hard to absorb: I don’t know if I’m just a lazy reader or whether she just produces occasionally muddled prose. Take this passage for example, about the woman’s grandparents:

Take the woman, my mother’s mother, whose king brother loved her more than any brother should love his sister. When their daughter, my mother, came into this world, my grandfather told his kingdom that my mother was born from the leaf of a rose. As she grew, the kingdom compared my mother’s beauty to a rose; she collected roses in her garden, wondering always which one of them was her father, as the king would never lie. He was beloved by all who served him, even the woman who sat each night silent by his side and watched the little girl as a hawk might watch the mouse it both envies and adores and loathes in the same death-swoop of its wings. My mother bloomed like an overnight rose, and when she went to dinner, her true father was so taken with her, he abandoned his place beside the woman who thought she loved him, having known no other love but his for the whole of her life.
“She is a treacherous witch,” my grandmother whispered to her brother in his sleep, to see how it sounded across her tongue. But it hurt her to say so, and she snuck into her daughter’s room and leaned over my mother’s bed and cried across her sleeping form. The next day the king sent my mother into the woods, despite her mother his sister my grandmother’s protestations, despite her insistence that the girl was theirs, not born from the leaf of a rose but born from her own body, even if they convinced themselves there was truth to their lies.  p. 168-169

Is that the simplest and most elegant way to convey that information?
There is also this at the end of the first paragraph of this story: “The top of the palace’s tallest turrets shine tipped in gild.” Is that last part supposed to be “are tipped with shiny gilt”? And later, after a soldier gets shown a transformation spell by a forest witch in exchange for a kiss, he goes to win a princess’s hand:

With his puppy eyes, he won her heart, along with three wishes from the witch’s magic matchbox, a prize the witch traded him for a job in the castle. The soldier used these wishes this matchbox to pay the king riches beyond imagining, though of course the king had so many riches already he barely noticed the extra gold in his stacks.  p. 153

What? I assume, given the “her mother his sister my grandmother” part in the long passage above, the “these wishes this matchbox” part is intentional but, even given that (strange) stylistic choice, the paragraph is still garbled (is that first sentence supposed to be “With his puppy eyes, he won her heart. Later, in exchange for a job in the castle, the witch gave him a magic matchbox with three wishes”?) Am I the only reader of this story that had to periodically stop to try and decipher what the writer was trying to say? Whoever line edits at BCS (if there is anyone) doesn’t do the contributors any favours.
Apart from the jumbled writing, there may also be one or two inconsistencies in the story. (Or maybe I was being less than attentive. What can I say? I probably started skimming after several skirmishes with the prose.) One example: during the period when the king’s daughter is with the witch I thought she lost her ability to perform a card spell, but then she uses it again at the end of the story.
Parts of this are okay, but at the end (spoiler) the reunification scene between father and daughter resolves in such a way that you are left with a piece about the dysfunctional relationship between the two and not much else.

The Examination Cloth by Jonathan Edelstein involves a man called Ukeme undergoing a test that involves answering the questions posed by a tapestry woven by one of the egun-wives. One of the questions stumps him, and he cheats by using a spell learned from his mother (also a weaver) to divine the thoughts of the egun-wife who wove the tapestry. He almost immediately regrets his action, and the rest of the story details how he tries to first reverse and then deal with his cheating.
This is pleasant enough as far as it goes but is even more fragmentary than usual for BCS.
The Root Cellar by Maria Haskins is a bizarre tale about a girl talking to her missing brother (or herself) about how she killed her grandmother. This latter event appears to have taken place after the girl herself was dismembered, but had later sewn (most of) herself back together.

The Wild Ride of the Untamed Stars by A. J. Fitzwater has a capybara (a dog-size rodent) and a marmot race stars for the hand of the rat-queen. If that doesn’t work as a description then read this:

Cinrak, calling upon all the practise she’d done with the narwhals, bent low and kissed the mer-hair rope. How would it respond this high up? It was a being of the sea, not the air, pulling stars down with mer song to meet with their sibling celestials in the deep, not to tame them. She didn’t want to force supplication. The stars had travelled too far, shone upon too much, for such brute force.
“Fly, darling star, fly!” Cinrak yelled. She didn’t kick at the star’s sides like others would a beast mount. Stars were too precious for that.
The star leapt ahead like a dolphin racing the Impolite Fortune’s bow. Cinrak almost tumbled off the back, only holding her perch by the sheer force of her thick thighs and quickly looped sailor’s knot.  p. 11

Stylistically pleasant candy floss.
The Ghostpotion Games by Christian K. Martinez is another story about a competition. In this one the narrator, Erina, has to create a ghost to run a maze:

With tool in hand Erinia squeezed up little droplets of liquid and puffs of gas from the leatherwood case in front of her, ferrying them into her carpenter soul with flicks of her wrist and tiny squeezes of the dropper.
First abandon, paired with an anxious need to act. Next the desperate knowledge of something better just over the hill; a lavender breath of smoke, something she’d bargained from a vampire tricked into daylight and cowering beneath a tree. Not hope; hope was malleable. She’d hoped before, she was hoping now; held it clenched between her teeth like a blade of ice. It was a terrible thing.
Her last touch, [an] earnest melancholy, that sort of relentless tapping of apathy on the glass; threatening to sink in claws if one slowed long enough for it to grasp. She’d tested them all together, twice. It’d worked once; the time before…it’d fallen apart.
She mixed both into her beaker with a stick made from mother of pearl and breathed a sigh of relief as she left it spinning there, her ghostly mixture slowly eating it away. The scream in her bottle shifted as the stick dissolved until it was mallets made of pearl and wood thudding away, beating walls into shape, passing nails into planks. No more cutting, no more slicing.  p. 21-22

The prize is a wish granted by the Nine Empresses. If I understood the ending correctly (spoiler), Erinia’s wish is to start the competition again.
Again, there is not much story but there is a lot of writing. And, again, I started to skim.

A Tale of Woe by P. Djèlí Clark is another story that tripped me up at the start:

Rana sat on the cracked granite steps of the prayer pools at the outskirts of the city of Aruth, listening as the old fisherman poured out his sorrow. It flowed from him like a breached dam, flooding the space between them with memories and regrets. She looked past his words, past the lines of grief etched on his worn face, and eyed the woe that clung to him—enough to fill scrolls that amounted to a lifetime. One, larger than the rest, told of a son: a young man with a boy’s face sent off to war, never to return. It wound thick tendrils about the fisherman’s neck, choking away his life.

At the “One” sentence I wasn’t sure if the writer was referring to the scrolls or something else; by the “It” I had no idea what was going on. After unsuccessfully trying to decipher this waffle I moved on and discovered the narrator can “see” the woe or grief that surrounds people (and is able to physically remove it). I would suggest that, if you are presenting something unusual like this to the reader at the very beginning of your story, you make what is happening explicit, e.g.: “Rana sat on the cracked granite steps . . . poured out his sorrow. She saw his grief as thick grey tendrils winding around the man’s neck; in one of them she saw the story of a son, etc.”¹
As for the story, Rana is an acolyte of the Goddess of Sorrow and is in the city on a personal mission when she is kidnapped at the behest of one of the local noblewomen. Rana soon gets the better of her kidnappers (she can give people woe as well as remove it, and an excess of the former incapacitates them) and confronts the lady. Rana discovers the noblewoman is an acolyte of the Goddess of Sorrow and, after removing her woe, Rana gets papers that will admit her to the inner circle, and the Grand Benevolence, the ruler of the city.
We then find (spoiler) that a rogue member of Rama’s order has taken the Grand Benevolence’s place (there are flashbacks to Rana’s friend Lika throughout the story and, sure enough, we find she is the one who has replaced him).
The story ends with a battle between them which is well enough done, but by that point I’d somewhat lost interest due to the slow-moving start (it doesn’t really get going until the kidnap). I suppose it is okay overall.
The Weaver and the Snake by Blaine Vitallo is the best story in the issue, and one told in (other contributors please note) a lucid and readable prose style. The story tells of Reilitas, a woman who transforms animal parts into unique objects:

Reilitas is an old woman. She will turn one-hundred-and-three on the third of next month. Ever since she was a younger and much thinner woman, she has crafted all manner of things from the corpses of beasts that the hunters bring her. She is called “weaver,” though her trade has little to do with weaving. The title is given to all who practice the ancient profession of changing the bodies of beasts into whatever wares the weaver herself, or the hunter, or a client desire.
For decades Reilitas has been famous throughout the desert kingdom for seeing, in each foreign material she is brought, the multitude of new forms it could be made to take. She has changed the ribs of bloated beasts into harps; she has peeled thick hides from the cold bodies of fanged predators and treated them in acids until they are malleable; she has dipped in lacquer distilled from the leaves of hardy desert plants the crystalline eyeballs of monsters made of minerals to be marbles for the children to play with; she has directed the scarred muscular bone cutters as they whittle long sturdy jaws into saw-toothed blades. With the help of young women in flowing white gowns—all of them novice weavers—Reilitas has bound into thick cables the rubbery tentacles of ghoulish leviathans. She sells the goods she has made to merchants who carry them in caravans across the white sand desert that stretches beyond the horizon.
Decade after decade, she has performed this duty for the people of Adamondor, city of marble and alabaster: a thriving metropolis built atop a wide mesa overlooking the white sand desert.  p. 44-45

The citizens of the city then feel a distant earthquake, and later hear stories of a great snake that has appeared in the world. Initially these accounts are treated as little more than rumours, but it soon becomes apparent that they are not, and the bulk of the story tells of the cities the snake consumes and the refugees created. Later, even though Reilatas’s city Adamondor is never attacked, civil society breaks down and gives way to lawlessness.
The final section of the story turns the piece into a meditation on the legacy of artists and perhaps, more generally, what people leave behind when they die. This is an elegiac piece from a writer to watch.

The panoramic cover, Legendary Passage by Jereme Peabody, is a slightly bland landscape (a peril of this kind of illustration) but I liked looking at it nonetheless, and the statue of the woman on the right hand side of the arch provides some interesting detail.

Overall this is a disappointing batch of issues, even given that three of these stories are what I would describe as ‘good.’ The first two of those are professionally competent rather than inspiring and, as for the others, they generally have the usual BCS shortcomings: poor or non-existent structure and/or muddled, ungrammatical prose.  ●

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1. It’s not just me that is picking up this line/copy-edit stuff: Jason McGregor at Featured Futures (its on the last link of the four of his above) says this:

“A Tale of Woe” [.  . .] is rife with grammatical errors, typos, or at least non-optimal expressions (“an inhale of breath,” “beggars and the infirmed,” “sold for so cheap,” “sowed” (for “sewed”), “to kidnap she and her family,” “[p]ulling her scissor,” “had Elder Awan’s voice not rang across her thoughts”).  ●

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