Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank, All
Charles Payseur, Quick Sip Reviews, #247, #248, #249
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures, #247, #248, #249
Stephanie Wexler(2), Chuck Rothman, Tangent Online, #247, #248, #249
Various, Goodreads, #247, #248, #249
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Editor-in-Chief, Scott H. Andrews
Fiction:
#247:
The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes • short story by Siobhan Carroll ∗∗∗+
Braving the Morrow Candle’s Wane • short story by J. W. Alden ∗∗
#248:
She Who Hungers, She Who Waits • short story by Cassandra Khaw ∗∗
Cry of Desire in a Shrouded Land • novelette by Talisen Fray ∗∗∗+
#249:
Weft • short story by Rahul Kanakia ∗
Fireskin • short story by Joanne Rixon ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Island Outpost • cover by Stefan Meisl
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As these three issues use the same cover art I’ve combined them together into one review.
The War of Light and Shadow, in Five Dishes by Siobhan Carroll tells the story of Leu the chef, who is taken prisoner by the Iron Crusade. He becomes a cook for the army, and we are subsequently told about the five dishes he prepares for Commander Eres:
Commander Eres said. “Make me some eggs.”
(Have you ever cooked an egg as though your life depended on it? The difference between cooked and overcooked is so slight; the seasoning so important. So simple, an egg. And so easy to get wrong.)
Leu stoked the kitchen fire to get an even heat and checked again the simmer on the copper pan. In the background, he could hear a guard whetting the blade on his dagger. Shhr. Shrr.
The egg at least was very fresh. He cracked it and held it close to the water before letting it fall in. Immediately he pushed the white over the yolk with his wooden spoon and held it for a few seconds. Only a small amount of pale liquid fell away from the white.
The plate the guard brought was crusted with old food. Leu wiped it clean—his eyes on the pot—and then, swiftly, like a bird plunging into water, scooped the egg free with a slotted spoon. From the spice pouch around his neck he took a pinch of Fera sea salt to bring out the flavor.
(I always slow my hand as I lower the last flake of salt, to draw out the moment, to make the diners lean forward. When, at the end of your first year of your apprenticeship, you recreate this dish, you must think how you wish to present your egg, what part of the war you wish this dish to tell.)
Eres accepted the plate with a slight frown. With her knife, she cut the egg. It slid apart perfectly, oozing bright orange yolk. The white wobbled lightly on the blade. And the taste—
A perfect egg is a slash of light on a gray day. The yolk tastes of sun-riched earth, the pale chalaza like a slice of raindamp cloud, a taste so mild you might miss it but unmistakably there, lingering, insisting on its presence. p. 7-8
Although the bulk of the narrative is about the preparation of the meals, details in the background provide an account of the ongoing war of Light and Shadow, and the Iron Crusade’s progress. As the meals increase in sophistication, Commander Eres becomes increasingly distracted by the chef’s requirements, and alters her army’s course and actions to accommodate him. Unwittingly, the chef changes the course of the war.
This is a pretty good piece, one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies maybe, but there are one or two parts that could do with a polish (I bounced off the first paragraph a couple of times before I could get into the story, for example).1
Braving the Morrow Candle’s Wane by J. W. Alden concerns a woman who has taken a girl in off the streets. When there is a knock at the door she tells her to hide. The rest of the piece is taken up by the exchange between the woman and the caller (a young man in armour from the Twice-Risen temple), who is searching the girl. When he comes into the house, the woman distracts him by telling a tale about her own service for the Temple and how she found—and lost—her faith.
This is engaging stuff but it reads like a single scene from a longer work, a common Beneath Ceaseless Skies problem.
She Who Hungers, She Who Waits by Cassandra Khaw opens with a woman taking a man to her room after their meal at an inn. Shortly after his arrival the man passes out:
Mei Huang lays out her client on the sheets. He has been one of her easier ones. Quick to slumber and eager to please, but not eager enough that he would breach etiquette. A smile slits her face at the memory of his clumsy overtures, almost shy, the performance of a boy, for all his musculature would suggest a man. That was never a possibility. Mei Huang prefers to keep pleasure and providence separate; and besides, her heart lies elsewhere, preserved in resin for the devoted to see.
She disinfects her scalpel in a saucer of boiling water. When the blade is hot enough, she applies the tip to his sternum and cuts, slicing along the breastbone, down to his groin. Skin and muscle part into wings, otherwise undamaged. Mei Huang prides herself on her ability to leave minimal scarring.
Under the marble rungs of his ribs, viscera gleam and pulse.
For a moment, she can see how this vision might invite desire. To see someone, man or woman, revealed as such, to witness them so vulnerable, it is a kind of power, compelling in its rarity. But that is not what she is here for.
Gingerly, Mei Huang leans forward to inspect the glyphs inlaid into the man’s bones: government-issue agate, embedded without artistry; the stones dulled by mucus, no enchantment to preserve their shine. A soldier’s markings and a soldier’s future, a tragedy dug into the trenches. Dead before his twenty-third birthday, his eyes consigned to the crows. p. 4-5
She then examines the various alternative possibilities for his life, all of which end in death at a young age. Before she can sew him up (spoiler) he regains consciousness and his guts spill out. At this point she calls on a goddess, ‘She Who Must Wait’ for aid. In return for this the woman agrees to ‘carry’ the goddess (she later looks like a pregnant woman). However, this is a subterfuge to enable the woman get reach her sister—or at least I think that’s what going on. I found it difficult to follow some of the later scenes, partly because it is of one of those stories where anything can happen next, and does.
Cry of Desire in a Shrouded Land by Talisen Fray gets off to an atmospheric start:
Once again it was that horrid time of year when the cashmere silk spiders crept from the bowels of the city of the angels and spun their pale web across its spires and domes, and Lukas the vendor of miracle tea felt a deep shudder begin in his testicles and rise to his dry mouth which had long ago forgotten the taste of kisses. p. 21
Lukas is a seller of an expensive ‘miracle tea’, a brew that purportedly grants the drinker their wish. He is infatuated with the flower girl, Vidita, who visits his house every day: she wants to learn the secret recipe for the tea, and is playing a long game of seduction with him. Her plan once she has the secret is to sell the tea herself, and earn enough money to buy her own and her mother’s freedom.
Both Lucas’s and Vidita’s stories intertwine with those of a slim young man from the Exterminator’s Guild, hired to rid the house of spiders. While he undertakes this task, he also has an affair with Lukas’s wife.
At the end of the story there is (spoiler) a decoupling of those who have drunk the tea, and those who get their wishes.
This novelette (it crams so much in that it feels like a novella but is actually only 10,700 words) unfolds, at times, in languid, moody prose (the style reminds me of another writer but I can’t think who):
With her bare feet making tiny thumps on the broad stone pathway, she would pass through the cool hibiscus-scented air of the gardens and reach the wide antechamber of the house where, with slow and practiced motions, she began the dance of distribution. A bouquet full of rarities and sweet scent for milady’s boudoir (a place Lukas had long lost his fascination for); a large goblet with several coin-shaped brilliants floating—no scent—for the dining room; a ring of posies for the tearoom entrance, never mind that there were no supplicants at this time of year; and a chunky glass vase full of strange pale green leaves for the master’s bedroom. Behind her floated a faint perfume that first brought Lukas a moment of peace and nostalgia and then, over the weeks of mounting tension, an increasingly sexual hunger that disturbed him like the long-gone fascination for miracle tea that had driven him, as a sheltered bookish boy, to undertake the adventure of legends and walk alone through the ghost villages and poison fields and dragon nests that guarded the secret of his obsession. p. 23
In the country, spiders were less a hated obstruction and more a seasonal inconvenience, like calving season or the harsh snow and ice of winter. The young exterminator found he could sense the first spiderweb floating in the breeze and catching on a jutting chimney, and he seemed to hear the subtle clacking of the spider legs on the roof, the walls, the floors. He cried the first time he saw a spider killed and he took the intact abdomen back to his rooms, where he washed the pale insides and the glowing lavender venom from it and then studied it for hours. There was a traced design on the inside—a map, it seemed to him, possibly of the stars, possibly points of importance in a city or a country, inked in subtle glowing red against the pale grey of the carapace. That spider season, when the webs grew so thick that the doors had to be cleared from the outside before they could be pushed open and all outdoor travel ceased, the boy spent his time in his father’s library, reading every book lining the walls and even bringing his father’s distant gaze to bear on the topic. They never found the key to the mystery, but they did spend many still hours in the refuge of the library, and later when the exterminator was far away, he would remember these times with a kind of affection that embarrassed him, even in the silence of his own consciousness. p. 49
Another possibility for the ‘Best of the Year’ collections.
Weft Rahul Kanakia starts off with three people having a meal and talking about a girl, a cook’s assistant, who they are pursuing. They are an odd group: the narrator appears to have a magical power over threads, Rina is an ethereal spirit, and Aakash is a weird creature that can shed his body:
The crack of bones and the slap of flesh against wood.
Aakash was expanding, sloughing off his skin. This was not something he did lightly. With his skin, Aakash is merely an unpleasant sight. Without it, he’s terrifying.
“Don’t need all that,” he said. “Considering all the dead bodies we’re about to make.”
His eyes flickered, and his many mouths snapped open and shut, and I experienced in that moment a sense of terror. I was not made for a life of violence. p. 8-9
The narrator tries to convince the others to let the girl go free and then, after some discussion, an event occurs which was not entirely clear to me, followed by a scene where the narrator finds the girl.
There are elements of this that show promise, but as a story it does not work.
Fireskin by Joanne Rixon is about Aun-ki, the king’s champion, and how her skin catches fire:
In late summer of the fourteenth year of the reign of Feihu the Road-Builder, on a day when the portents suggested peace and prosperity throughout the city and all its territories, the warrior Aun-ki woke up and found that her skin caught fire at the slightest touch. Pale flickers of flame sprouted on her brown arms, almost invisible in the sunlight, then guttered out. Even the light drape of her dressing gown across her shoulders was like the grind of a blade on a whetstone, striking sparks. The fabric browned, and when her apprentice Jin-ho came in to help her bathe, Jin-ho’s fingers left streams of blisters in their wake. p. 16
She seeks the king’s permission to go to Lake of Five Waters, to see if they will cure her. They don’t, and the rest of the story describes other quests she undertakes with her assistant to seek a remedy. Between these journeys she returns to the village and stays with the weaver—their relationship develops.
This is readable, engaging stuff but, unfortunately (spoiler), the story has no ending (at least not for the problem of her skin—she gives up on that and lives with it till she dies, but spends her remaining time with the weaver: an ending of sorts, I suppose).
The cover for these three issues is Island Outpost by Stefan Meisl.
Two superior stories in these three editions, which makes this quite a good ‘issue’. ●
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1. It may be my brain and not Carroll’s writing, but I struggled with the opening:
Leu was in the chicken coop when the wall was breached. At the very moment of which I speak, he was facing down Black Dragon, the largest and most homicidal of the barracks’s surviving hens. She’d bloodied his hands in a frenzied attempt to get at his eyes. Now, as shouts of terror echoed in the distance, the two combatants stared each other down over a mass of trampled reeds. Behind Black Dragon (at this point I usually gesture to the diners, who sit as you do, an expectant plate before them): two eggs, the last ones available for Lord Fio’s breakfast. Behind Leu (at this point I gesture outwards, to the world): the wrath of Lord Fio, a spoiled young man with a penchant for poached eggs and a nasty habit of whipping his servants. p. 2
What do I not like about this? Well, put briefly, it does not flow well, something that the opening paragraph(s) of a story should do. More specifically:
(a) The focus shifts from Leu to the narrator to the chicken in the first three sentences.
(b) “Barracks’s surviving hens” may be orthographically correct2 (although Microsoft Word doesn’t think so) but it looks and sounds weird (too many s’s for one thing), and I ended up staring at it for several seconds while I figured out whether or not it was a typo.
(c) The last two parenthetical interjections by the narrator (and the colons) make it harder to read, too.
None of this would be a problem further on, but those of us with a reading age of 12 or thereabouts prefer less complicated beginnings so we can more easily slip into the story, e.g.:
Leu was in the chicken coop when the wall was breached. At that moment he was facing down Black Dragon, the largest and most homicidal of the castle’s surviving hens, and his hands had been bloodied by her frenzied attempt to get at his eyes. Now, as shouts of terror echoed in the distance, the two combatants stared each other down over a mass of trampled reeds. Behind the hen lay two eggs, the last ones available for Lord Fio’s breakfast (at this point in the story I usually gesture to the diners, who sit as you do, with an expectant plate before them). Behind Leu lay the wrath of Lord Fio (at this point I gesture outwards, to the world), a spoiled young man with a penchant for poached eggs and a nasty habit of whipping his servants.
Yes, I know, don’t give up your day job, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks, etc., etc.
2. This is what Wikipedia has to say, in part, about singular noun possession:
If a singular noun ends with an s-sound (spelled with -s, -se, for example), practice varies as to whether to add ’s or the apostrophe alone. A widely accepted practice is to follow whichever spoken form is judged better: the boss’s shoes, Mrs Jones’ hat (or Mrs Jones’s hat, if that spoken form is preferred). In many cases, both spoken and written forms differ between writers.
It is interesting to note that Algis Budrys is quoted in this article (footnote #66). From Galaxy Bookshelf, Galaxy Science Fiction (December 1965), pp. 147–156, there is this:
If you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands.
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