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Authors: Steven Savile

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I waited. Very probably, Green Handbag had stolen a march on me.
“Wait a minute.” Brontë was scratching her head; it was an impressive sight. I had never seen such flexible antennae. “He forced a story into us with his beastly mind-blast. A
fairy tale.
” She glared at Ne'il accusingly.
“Ne'il Gae-munn,” he said, making a little song of it.
“Neil Gay-mun?” Winton echoed. “Who the heck was he?”
I saw the shudder go through Brontë's whole body; the cold disapproval enter Armahalon's eyes.
“Some of you know Neil Gaiman's work, I see.” I ignored the chill in the air and went on gamely. “This is quite a coincidence, unless, of course, our friend here has psychic abilities. The story we're going to look at now is one of Gaiman's. It's coming through on your PRDs now; please read it silently and we'll discuss it when you're finished.”
There was a mutinous quality about the ensuing silence. After a little, Brontë spoke. “This exercise is a waste of time for me. I can't comment on this kind of thing. I don't understand the conventions.”
“If I had known we were going to discuss
genre
fiction,” Armahalon delivered the offending word with brittle distaste, “I would never have enrolled for the class.”
“I, too, am a literary writer,” Dickens put in apologetically.
“This is for children,” growled K'gruz. “Stepmothers, dwarves,
magic fruit … It can have nothing at all to do with an advanced class in literary critique.”
I waited.
Seth was a fast reader; he was already well into the story. “For children? Oh, I do not think so,” he said. “It is a dark tale. Unsettling.”
“I need coffee,” Saramago declared, rising to his feet. “Call me when we get to—”
“Sit down!” I said. “I'm in charge here. Read the story. Ne'il, why aren't you reading? You are a participant in the group, aren't you?”
He smiled beatifically, and I imagined Yoda saying,
Old am I.
“I know the tale,” he said. “‘Snow, Glass, Apples,' yes?”
“All the same—”
“By heart,” he said. “Is not that the home of all good tales: the heart?”
“Some would disagree with you,” I told him in an undertone, for the class had been hooked by the story and was reading avidly now. “Some would say the intellect. Or even the soul.”
“Mmm,” Ne'il said, his eyes luminous. “Or the balls?”
I looked at him.
“Or anatomical equivalent,” he said, glancing around the table. There was perhaps one and a half sets of testicles between the lot of us.
“Good joke,” I whispered. “We're seriously lacking in humor here. Do you think I can teach this lot to laugh at themselves? Can they find their own hearts, and one another's?”
“If hearts they have,” Ne'il said, grinning, “find them we will.”
 
 
It was a grueling few days. Each student was different. Each was compelled by dreams, hopes, delusions; each was full of insecurity and prejudice, envy and bias. They knew their stuff, that was, the narrow personal corridor of fiction writing each had decided was worthy of his or her in-depth study. Some had real talent. Dickens had written a huge
novel of nineteenth-century London, full of sly humor and unforgettable characters. Saramago surprised us with a piece in which comparative religion was studied through father/son relationships. I was impressed that a being with so many teeth at his disposal was the intergalactic equivalent of a humanist. Brontë's work was lightweight, Armahalon's impenetrably deep. Winton spent his nights in the bar and turned up late for class until I called him a slacker. The next day he brought us a delicate piece of short fiction, a gem of stylistic simplicity.
“Ah,” Ne'il said. “You are a storyteller.”
 
 
By the second day they were forming reluctant bonds. By the third day they were going to the bar en masse to down the brew of their choice and argue late into the night about Eliot Perlman's use of the second person and whether magic realism was just a particularly pretentious form of genre fiction. By the final day most of them had seen their own work with new eyes. Brontë was the exception; she hugged her piece defensively, refusing to change a single word. Atwood was restructuring her picaresque epic into a verse novel. K'gruz had reduced the number of breast references in his manuscript from fifty-four to twelve, and found synonyms for
pert
and
perky
.
Ne'il had submitted no written work at all. Every night as the members of Tough Love 3001 gathered in the
Intergalactic Voyager
's smoky watering hole, he would sit amongst them and tell a story. They were tales of dragons and heroes, of hardship and quest, of self-discovery and heartbreak. They were myths, legends, sagas, and fairy tales. They were, without a doubt, genre fiction. From the moment the diminutive green narrator opened his mouth to the time when he said “and they lived happily ever after,” not a soul in that bar made so much as a squeak, a rustle, a sigh. Ne'il had them in the palm of his hand, or anatomical equivalent.
 
 
At the final class, I thanked them for their dedication and hard work and was able to say quite truthfully that I was sorry the course was over. They offered grave compliments in return: they had learned much, they would never forget me, they would be back next year.
“Where's Ne'il?” I asked, seeing the ninth chair was empty. “Has his shuttle left already? He didn't say good-bye.”
“Alas, we do not know,” said Dickens. “Perhaps he has exhausted his fund of tales. All good things come to an end. Annie, we wish to present you with this gift in token of our appreciation.”
I'd been rather hoping for a bottle of wine or perhaps a flask of the powerful
k'grech
they brewed on K'gruz's home planet. This silver-wrapped parcel was more the size and shape of a cake, or maybe a hat. I tore off the ribbon and the shiny paper and choked in horror.
It was a handbag. It was fuzzy and green, velourlike in texture, and had a cosy rotundity of form. The handle was constructed from two large, ear-shaped flaps knotted together.
“We made it for you,” Armahalon said in his humming tones.
“We made it all together,” said Saramago, showing his teeth.
“I've never liked fantasy,” observed K'gruz. “All those dragons and women in gauze and leather. It's so … so …”
I clapped my hands over my mouth, wondering if I could make it to the gleaming toilet facilities of the
Intergalactic Voyager
before I spewed up my breakfast all over the floor. Stars spun before my eyes; my knees buckled.
“Dickens, fetch water,” a familiar voice murmured somewhere close by. “Our attempt at humor has misfired. Annie, do not cry.”
“You should read more nonfiction, Annie,” said Atwood drily. “Didn't you know Ne'il's species shed their skins every full moon?”
I opened my eyes. There beside me on the floor was Ne'il, or at least I assumed it was he; his new skin was a delicate shade of mauve.
“It's closer to lilac,” he corrected, smiling. “See, you taught them to laugh.”
“That wasn't funny!” I snapped as my heartbeat returned to normal. “I thought—”
“Ah,” said Ne'il, “you forgot my name. Is not the sweetest of fairy tales tinged with darkness? Such duality lies at the heart of all experience: light and shadow, safe reality and fearsome imagining, fruitful summer and fallow winter. Has not the most charming of Gae-munn's work a tiny touch of horror?”
“What?” gasped Brontë, looking truly affronted. “Fantasy
and
horror? You mean there's such a thing as—
double-genre?
”
“Never mind,” I said. “Write your stories, dream your dreams, work hard, and come back next year if you can. And if I don't see you again, live happily ever after.”
The bag was heavy. When I got back to my room I discovered it held three squat miniflasks of top quality
k'grech,
guaranteed to blow out the drinker's eyeballs. My students had passed with flying colors.
BY TIM LEBBON
 
Tim Lebbon's novels include
Desolation
,
Berserk
,
The Nature of Balance
,
Face,
and
Until She Sleeps.
His work has been published in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
. He has won a Bram Stoker Award, a Tombstone Award, and two British Fantasy Awards, as well as being nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Lebbon is one of the young stars in the resurgence of speculative fiction in the UK; a number of his stories are being developed for film and television, and he has recently finished working with Mike Mignola on a new Hellboy project. You can read more about Lebbon's work at
www.timlebbon.net
.
Lebbon is never afraid of writing a “difficult” story. Characters in his world suffer and hurt in ways most of us can only imagine—and if we are actually honest with ourselves would never want to imagine. His signature on a story inevitably means that the reader is going to share some of that suffering. “Chanting the Violet Dog Down” is no exception. It offers a unique glimpse into the dark heart of Noreela, the setting for Lebbon's most recent novel,
Dusk,
and its forthcoming sequel,
Dawn
(Bantam Dell). The land is in turmoil. Noreela itself is dying. The first stage of that long slow death is the fading of the magic that bound the bones of the world together, and with it, its powers to keep the stuff of nightmares at bay. The Mourners from the Temple of Lament do their best to help the dead find rest, but sometimes their best is not enough. There's a wealth of information about the Mourners, the Violet Dogs, and the many wonders of Noreela on the dedicated Web site at
www.noreela.com
.
Lebbon lives in Monmouthshire, Wales.
 
 
The Mourner stared
down at the empty graves, and began to wonder why.
She had come a long way to be here and now that she realized her trip was wasted, there was little to do but turn and head for home. There were no dead to dwell over, no wraiths to chant down to peace with her strange songs … only a field of ragged holes, soil humped beside them like recumbent loved ones grieving lost friends.
She walked slowly across the field. It had snowed last night, and the rough bottoms of the graves were coated with a virgin layer. The soil piled around them still broke surface, as though warm enough to melt any snow that settled there. The Mourner knelt, scooped up a mixed handful of snow and soil and let it fall between her fingers. Cold. She closed her eyes and delved inward, but it was cold in there as well.
The only footprints were her own.
She stood and hugged her cloak around her. A cool breeze blew in from the north, agitating the forest that bounded the northern edge of the field and shaking snow from the leafless limbs. It fell in dusty sprays, creating false movement in the shadows. The Mourner sighed and tried to look deeper.
She had walked two hundred miles from Long Marrakash, stopping only to eat and once to sleep, and all the way she had been dwelling on the period of Mourning to come. In the Temple of Lament she had been touched by the sense of death from this place; a virulent disease had wiped out most of the small village of Kinead, and she had collected her meager belongings and gone to serve as its Mourner. She and others like her drifted to and fro across the north of Noreela, out to sites of great loss and back again, like tides of blood in a great living thing; the Temple of Lament its heart, the places of death its fading extremities. It was ironic that as the land slowed down, so its blood flowed faster.
The walk had been long, the going harsh, and those hours and days of introspection had served to sharpen her mind.
Now she was cold and tired, and her mental preparation had formed a weight inside, a pressure craving release. She had been expecting several days of mourning, yet she had found only empty holes in the ground. The bodies had gone elsewhere, and she could sense no wraiths to chant down.
She walked back and forth across the field, looking down into each rough hole but finding only more snow. She was well versed in death and she could see that these graves, though opened up and spread across the ground, were still relatively new. Whatever had once occupied them
had been buried weeks, perhaps even days before. There were no loose bones here, no scraps of rotten clothing, no mad wraiths skimming beneath the surface of the world as they tried to come to terms with living no more. And with every breath she took, the Mourner sensed the scent of fresh death on the air.
She scanned the foliage bounding the graveyard, the shadows beneath the trees, searching for observers or signs of the absent dead. There were none. She was alone with these waiting holes.
“Death can go nowhere on its own,” she whispered, and a breeze snatched her words away like rare birds. She heard their echo, though there was nothing to echo from.
She left the empty graveyard and headed through the trees for Kinead.
 
 
Perhaps before the Cataclysmic War two centuries before Kinead might have been a happy, healthy village. But like many places across Noreela since that terrible War ended, this village was falling into ruin. Stone buildings were patched and repaired with timber, and timber dwellings were rotting into the ground. The frozen stream was black as night, the two tracks passing through the village were filled with potholes, and a large machine stood motionless at the crossroads, its hollowed stone and metal carcass exposed to the elements. A skull raven sat atop the dead machine, watching the Mourner as she walked slowly into the silence.
There were no signs of life. Snow blanketed the village, its surface pristine and untouched by anything other than a few lonely, hungry birds. The door to the tavern was wedged open by a chair lying on its back. The Mourner passed by, glancing inside but unable to make out any detail. It was dark in there. She could smell spilled ale and rotten food. She closed her eyes; still no wraiths.
“Where are you?” she said. The village did not answer.
She moved to one of the stone dwellings, mounted its terrace, and stood before the door. There was a red smudge on the dark timber, as if
something bloody had been thrown against it. She looked around her feet but the terrace was empty. A small nudge from her boot opened the door with a creak of frozen hinges. She held her breath, probing inside for the owner's wraith but finding nothing. She could smell only must and age, not the stench of rot. No bodies here.
The people of Kinead were dead, their diseased passing rapid and painful enough to have been felt at the Temple of Lament. Every death was different, and the Mourner could recall the sense of Kinead's doom settling across her mind like a slayer spider's corrosive web.
Something unnatural
, she had thought, but that idea was not new. Much that happened in Noreela these days was strange.
During her journey from Long Marrakash, the bodies of Kinead's dead had been exhumed and taken away. With them, still attached by the shock of death and their fear of the endless Black that awaited them, their wraiths.
Taken where?
the Mourner thought.
And why
?
“You're here!” The voice held both wonder and dread. “I knew you would rise from the hollow field, I knew you'd come, I could smell you down there, hear you,
taste
you!”
The Mourner turned around and saw the naked man. He was standing shivering beside the dead machine, his skin gray in some places, red and purple in others where the cold had killed his flesh. He had a long beard clotted with blood, and in one feeble hand he carried a rusty sword. His fingers seemed to merge with the handle as though he could never let go.
“Who are you?” the Mourner asked. “Where are the dead? I'm here from Lament to mourn and chant them down.”
“Lament?” the man said. He frowned, took a couple of faltering steps, and went to his knees. He held the sword up before him. “You're not the Violet Dog?”
Violet Dog!
The words surprised the Mourner; so filled with dread yet uttered infrequently, and heard even less.
“No,” the Mourner said, remembering long lonely periods spent
reading in her room at Lament. “There are no Violet Dogs. They're a story from before history.”
The man looked at her, his eyes surprisingly bright in a face so wan. He seemed to be searching for something. She lowered her cloak's hood and let him see her face, and his eyes went wide. “Are you a Mourner?”
“I am,” she said.
“Then what of the Violet Dog?” The man looked around as if expecting someone or something else to join in the conversation.
The Mourner did not reply. Instead she pulled one hand from the wide sleeve of her cloak and delved inside for her knife. She plucked it from the strap around her waist and held it at the ready. The man was weak, almost dead, and he seemed to pose no real threat. But the air was filled with violence. She looked left and right around the village, and for the first time she saw and recognized the red splashes on many of the doors. Hand prints, in paint or blood. Perhaps they were signs of those households having fallen victim to the disease, or …
The Violet Dogs enjoy the taste of pain. They savor the tang of fear in the flesh, and they may mark their victims days or weeks before taking them
. Words the Mourner had read long ago in forgotten books, yet now they came to her unannounced.
“Death-whore!” The man came at her. He was surprisingly fast, jumping to his feet and covering the distance between them before the Mourner could lift her knife. He struck her across the forehead with the sword's hilt and fell on her as she stumbled back, pushing her down into the snow. It soaked quickly through her cloak, making her as cold as the dead. The man grinned down.
“Leave those wraiths where they flail and suffer,” he said. Spittle dribbled from his mouth and landed on her face. It was warm. She saw fever in his eyes, and she wondered how long he had left.
“I came here to—”
“You're not needed,” the man said. “
It
needs them, the Violet Dog, and it will be here to claim their rotting corpses soon.”
“There are no—”
“Violet Dogs?”
The Mourner tried to shift but the man held her down. Thin though he was, naked and half-dead from cold and disease, still he found strength in his madness.
Perhaps he'll kill me
, the Mourner thought. She glanced at his hands, looking at his nails to see whether they held grave dirt beneath them. But his nails were all torn off. And the sword raised in his right hand was not darkened by rust after all.
“Maybe,” he said. He drew close, the stubbled black flesh of his chin scraping the Mourner's cool lips. “Maybe not for a while. But the land is changing. And I know at least one of the secrets it's thrown up.” He stood, turned, and ran.
By the time the Mourner lifted herself from the ground, the man had vanished. He knew Kinead, she did not, and there was no chance of finding him.
So where are the dead?
she thought. She closed her eyes and calmed herself by listening for newly dead wraiths, but she heard only the background mumble that was evident almost anywhere in the land. Whispers from before history began, louder mutters from those dead these past few years, these were wraiths either at peace or with voices grown distant over time.
Where are you?
she thought. She expected and received no reply.
She considered going back to the field of open graves. Perhaps there she would find clues to the dead villagers' location: drag marks in the ground, a splayed corpse pointing the way. But she was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and it had started snowing again.
And there was something else. Though the rest of the village remained completely silent—the movement of the air itself dampened by the snow—she felt observed. The unsettling sensation had been growing since discovering the empty graves, and it had reached a new intensity the moment the naked madman left her lying on the ground. She scanned the village; windows, doorways, shadows beside leaning buildings and beneath leafless trees, rooftops and the spaces beneath stilted homes. She could see no one else. Even the skull raven had gone from
atop the dead machine, though she had not heard it fly away. The living had gone from this place, yet the mystery remained: the dead had vanished too.
The Mourner closed her eyes but sensed only time paying her attention, stretching out behind much farther than it ever could before. History was so rich and full, and the future held no certainties. The Cataclysmic War had seen to that.
The snow thickened, the first brief flurries replaced quickly with fat, wet flakes. The sky promised much more to come. The Mourner looked at the red hand prints on the doors of Kinead's buildings, certain that the madman had put them there yet still disturbed by their presence. Virtually every door she saw had a print, and one that did not—across from the frozen stream, a run-down dwelling that seemed to have a tree growing from its roof had suffered a recent fire. Its timber walls had fallen in, and the tree growing through its remains was charred black.

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