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Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters were an old shipwright’s firm, the oldest in the city.  They had respect, and they had recognition, and they had historical weight.

They also had no money, so when a strange little wet bag made entirely (if crudely) of woven kelp was pushed onto their dock in the dead of night one moonless, starless eve, they were willing to listen.

And that was why Jenma Haxi (of the Daughters) was out at the witching hour sitting in a dinghy in the shallow waters off Deadreef’s Point, under the shadow of half a lighthouse and over the rubble of the other half of the lighthouse.  The Point was a mite unstable, and it tended to shrug every so often.  Because the shipwrights needed money, but they needed their reputation too, and there was no point making the head of the firm look like an idiot when you could foist it off on someone younger and suspiciously keen.

Jenma was less keen than usual, even under her best sou’wester and three blankets and the hardiest longjohns her brother Bucal could sew. 

“Fuck,” she muttered, and not for the first time.  Something unseen bumped the boat lightly in agreement, and not for the first time.  “Fuck,” she repeated.  “Aw fuckity fuck fuck.”  Just what she needed: to be overturned and eaten by the first big shark to come in closer than the Deadreef in two generations.  “Fuckleberries with fucked cream.”  Typical, just typical. 

“Fu-”

A highly technical and directed stream of water hit her directly in the face, turning the next thirty seconds of swears into sputters.  Jenma spat and sneezed and coughed and hacked and heaved and by the time she knew which end was up she was headfirst over the gunwales and eye-to-eye with the least friendly-looking dolphin she’d ever met.  Despite its (somewhat scarred) permanent smile, it seemed to be giving her the stinkeye. 

“Hello,” she croaked.  “Fuck.  Ow.”
The dolphin spat in her face again.  This time she wasn’t inhaling, but that was about as big an improvement as she got. 

“Excuse me,” she managed. 

The dolphin clicked at her and bumped the boat with a floating piece of wood.  And not for the first time.

Oh.  Not a shark after all. 

“Got yourself a toy there?  Nice.  Please stop spitting at me.”

The dolphin bumped the boat.  Then spat at her.

When Jenma’s vision cleared up again, the driftwood was in the boat with her and the dolphin was gone. 

That suited her fine.  It had left her a lot of reading to do. 

***

One month later, Jenma rowed out past Deadreef’s Point again.  That had covered three weeks of explaining, pleading, wheedling, threatening, blackmailing, stonewalling, extorting, and demanding; one week of making very discreet enquiries to very very well-paid experts about very very VERY complicated arrangements; and a few days of screaming nameless dread and horror and frustration into her pillow.

Her brother Bucal had sewn that pillow for her as a child.  It was a tattered sack of sailcloth stuffed with rags that wasn’t fit to even be called an apprentice-piece, and she loved it more than gold. 

Which was why it was buried underneath the multiple complicated chests, packs, and sealed print-cases.  She needed a little bit of that love out here with her while she did this. 

Bump bump bump on the hull.  And this wasn’t the first time, so she peered over the side promptly.  She’d had enough water squirted in her face. 

“Hey.”
Two cold, icy little eyes glared back at her from above a big happy grin. 

“I’ve got the plans.  I can go over this step-by-step if you want.”

The sea moved, and underneath Jenma’s dinghy it was moved aside.  A great grey barnacled back beached her high and dry; a valve twisted and huge lungs breathed deep and slow. 

“Right then.”

So she went over it step by step.  There would be three, and each would take a long time. 

“Is this acceptable?”
Her client’s interpreter squeaked and clicked in the affirmative. 

“Good.  This is an off-the-books job, so there’ll be no master-marks on anything.  If word gets out the other shipwrights’ll tear me apart in town square, and I can’t say the rest of my family wouldn’t join them.”

A raspberry, long and extra watery. 

“Yes, yes, yes.  Just explaining the circumstances.”
Click click clickclickCLICK.

“We can start soon.  Meet up at Bluehollow Bay in three days, after nightfall.  And be prepared to pay for each step in advance.  And be prepared for it to hurt.  A lot.”
Her client spoke aloud for the first time, but it was very, very, very loud.  A dismissive snort is quite something when it’s forced through a blowhole. 

Jenma spent an hour scrubbing herself down when she got home.  The prospect of money helped keep her mind off what was coming out of her hair.  

***

Bluehollow Bay was beautiful in the moonlight.  Few waves, no wind, the perfect place to swim if you were from out of town and didn’t know about the massive drop that led into deep water, covering rip currents that could suck you out past the reach of everything but gulls. 

This, said the interpreter of Jenma’s client, would not be a concern.  She had arranged for protection.  And so there was, in the water around the huge floating mass of flesh – a circling squadron of fins that she had to explain to the barber-surgeons were NOT sharks about one hundred times.  Even then, some of them didn’t believe her until the interpreter poked his head up from the water to swear virulently at them.  Some tones transcend languages and species. 

So they stepped atop their patient, and they prepared their knives, and their saws, and their scoops, and their cauldrons and cauldrons of boiled antiseptics and soothing paste.

And they began to cut, and the bay ran red. 

The client made no complaints.  She held her breath as if she were on a deep dive, and every hour on the hour, as steady as a watch, she would exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, and hold again.

She did this ten times, and as the sun began to rise it was done. 

“Don’t dive,” Jenma told the interpreter.  “Not until the paste has dried away.  It’ll start to itch then, and it should be fine.  Give it a week and a day, and then we’ll bring in the smiths.

***

The smiths were less skittish than the doctors, although they were even more uncomfortable aboard a boat.  They’d all shoed horses, and although this was very different in the details the shape and the mass and the form of the thing was graspable in a manner that felt familiar and proper and right. 

So they stoked their little portable foundry on the shore, and they hammered and grunted and bent and poured and now and then explained to the interpreter what they were doing, because that sort of intense anger is something that demands answering for even if you aren’t sure how to do it. 

When each piece was ready – still glow-hot – it was whisked, tongs and all, into Jenma’s dinghy, and from there to the client, and from there into the client, and from there it was bolted, and nailed, and hammered, and sealed into place against rib and joint and blubber and hide.  The smell of cooked meat filled the air until it was enough to drive a lion to veganism, and everyone present took a small break for a vomit before lunch. 

The installation took all night and a bit of the day besides, but it was done. 

“Overtime pay,” Jenma said.  “I can’t skimp on silence from these people.”

The interpreter spat in her face again, but he begrudgingly hauled up yet another (smaller) little kelp-string-bag to her hands, brimming with pearls.

“Wait a month for the weight to settle,” said Jenma.  “And then we’ll do the tricky part.”

***

The tricky part wasn’t finding a power source – there was an infinite supply of seawater for boiling at hand, and a truly astonishingly potent heat-source – but tapping it without compromising the client. 

This was done with cogs and rods and wheels and gears and teeth and boilers and plungers and piping and waterproofing and they even managed to find a way to repurpose the body’s own oils as oils, more’s the wonder. 

Ammunition would be simple.  Hell’s grapeshot, loaded with whatever could be crammed in.  The expulsion method involved a lot of violence and steam, but well, again, water was easy. 

Jenma wished the designer was at hand, but Grand High Artificer and Lord Engineer Lop Pon-Deapwit was an ill little thing and she refused to be moved from her bedside until she was finished dying.  Ten months on and so far no luck, but one grew bored while dying and she’d been quite happy to distract herself with the worst technical problems she’d ever imagined.  Hadn’t even demanded a fee for the work, let alone her silence. 

The client settled low in the water when her project had been installed.  Heavy with iron, and with lead, and with something hotter and more hateful. 

“The job is done,” said Jenma, alone in her dinghy again as the last of the pale-faced clockmakers, cannoneers, and foundry-workers vanished over the road, over the horizon.  “And it all should work.  Do you want to field-test here, or-”

The client breathed out, then in, then dove.  She left so fast the water in Bluehollow Bay nearly came with her. 

Jenma sat back up and waited for the horizon to stop spinning.  “I think,” she said to the interpreter, “I had which one of you was the angry one all wrong, didn’t I?”

He cackled at Jenma, then squirted her in the face. 

***

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Ninety days out of port and not a sight but shattered jetsam, and at last the call, the blessed call to blood and sweat and money came down from the Brigmun’s mainmast.  The lookout sang loud and strong, lungs as good as a trumpet, from the peak all the way into the hull. 

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

The men scrambled, the boats were hoisted, the harpoons were seized.  Ahead it hove into sight, a lone cow, somnolent at the surface, heavy and low in the water with child (a bit wasteful, but best to take what you could get after this long a drought) and dreaming of happier things. 

 “THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, what was that glint? 
“THAR SHE BLOWS!”
It sparkled in the bright morning light, most unlike light on water.

“THAR SHE BLOWS!”

Wait, was that a CANNON?

“THAR SHE-”

…broadsides. 

***

For some years thereafter, whaling took a sharp and inexplicably lethal downturn.  At first the shipwrights did roaring trade replacing vessels, but only so much good money is willing to throw itself after bad, and soon the local harbours saw few vessels launched save for the little boats used by local fishermen.  The shipyards closed, their wrights moved away or retired. 

Except, that is, for Bukel and Haxi and Sons and Daughters.  Inexplicably, they did quite well for themselves. 

The hallway door creaked.  It wanted to fit in with the mansion’s walls, ceiling, floor, joints, attic, roof, cellar, and foundation. 

Through its portal came two figures: one tall and thin, one tall and thin and incredibly, exhaustively, exhaustingly old.

“Pay attention, Edith.  This is your heritage you’ll be looking at here.”
Edith shrugged underneath her jacket.  “Sure.”
“One day I’ll be gone, and all these heirlooms will be yours.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Now gaze upon my trophies!”

“’Kay.”
Lord High Conjurer Sir Archibald Quislip Stepford-Heimst blended a tsk into a sigh (an old trick he’d learned from his favourite nanny as a child).  “Edith, you’re looking at your phone-machine again, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“Youth!  It is wasted upon the youthful, my granddaughter!  Wasted!”
“Sure.”
“But there is always more to be wasted, until there isn’t.  Take this manticore, for instance!  Stuffed the thing myself when I was your age, my first solo taxidermy job.  Isn’t he a beaut?”
Edith glanced up at the lion-bodied, scorpion-tailed, man-skulled, many-toothed creature.  “Cool.”
“Indeed!  Fun trick about manticores: they love easy targets.  I simply paid a local peasant girl to stand out in the open for thirty minutes and I got a clear shot across the bastard’s haunches with my cursebow.  She got away with but a few scratches to the vertebrae, little ungrateful minx.”

Edith took a picture.

“I hope you aren’t going to show your friends that.  This is a private family pride.”
“Just recording.  Hey, this thing’s teeth are broken.”
“Indeed!  It was quite old and feeble.  First and best lesson in the ways of the world, m’girl – a fair fight is for fools.  Think smart: cheat.”

“How’d you cheat this one?” asked Edith, pointing upwards. 

“Hmm?”
“That one.  The one that’s the entire ceiling.”
“Oh, the dragon!  I forget it’s there sometimes; old Esteban plotted the ribs into the rococo so nicely.  Funny thing about dragons: they burn so hot they can scorch rocks but because of that they need more water than a locomotive.  So I poisoned all the water holes in a ten-mile radius of its lair and left the country.  They tend to die slow, you see, and vengeful.  Came back for the corpse when the rampage ended.”  Stepford-Heimst chuckled fondly.  “Oh, it was a feisty bugger.  Took out six villages and two good-sized towns before its guts died out on it.  It  was still glaring at me when I cut its throat, bless its scaly heart.”
“Cool,” said Edith. 

“Oh indubitably.  And the fangs, of course, went into my cursebow.  Which you won’t be inheriting.  Ol’ Duchess is getting buried with me, you see.  I shan’t dare part with her.”

“Did you use her on this?” inquired Edith, taking a picture of a single-orbited skull the size of a car.   A spectacularly huge shattermark filled its forehead.

“Oh goodness me no.  A cursebow against a cyclops would be like a spitball against a teacher: just makes ‘em crabby and liable to smack you.  No, I made his acquaintance formally under guest-right, exchanged gifts, the whole nine yards.  I believe his name was Xenos.”
“Did he like…give you his skull?”
“No, he gave me Duchess!  He forged it himself as a skill-testing exercise; far too small for him to use, like a man making sculpture on a needlepoint just to prove he could.  A master smith, but not surprising – cyclops-make has been the best you can find in the Mediterranean for the past two millennia.”

“What’d you give him?”
“A monocle!  He was quite nearsighted in his old age.  He thanked me with tears of joy, then tripped over a rock and smashed his forehead in immediately.”  Stepford-Heimst winked and laid a finer aside his nose.  “Just a little flaw in the glass.  Worked wonders since he had no depth perception to begin with.”
“Sick.”
“Oh?”
“Cool.”
“I see.”
Edith poked her phone again. 

“Anyways!” said Stepford-Heimst after about forty seconds.  “This is one of my favourites.  Care to lift the lid on this case?”
“You do it,” said Edith with the flat and blunt awareness of one who had learned all about the sense of humour shared by elderly relatives.

“Oh come now.  One little peek?”

“You first.”
“Spoilsport.”  The lid raised, and even looking away, Edith squinted at the glare.

“Ohohoho!  The look on your face!  My word!  A fine knee-slapper, eh?”
“Ow.”
“This, m’girl, is a phoenix egg!  You have any idea how rare those are?”

“Very?”
“Quite so!  I befriended it in its dotage, tended it with care, and then –”

“-attacked it in its sleep?”
“No, no, goodness no!  Phoenixes don’t sleep.  No, I waited until it died of old age, then stabbed it to death in its own shell before it could finish reincarnating.  Used lead needles.  Fun little fact: a phoenix’s rebirth relies upon a very limited and delicate form of nuclear reaction.  Probably why your mother doesn’t have any more siblings eh?   Eh?  Eh?”
Edith’s face contorted in the agony of one forced to imagine a relative having sex. 

“Ohohohohohohohohohohoho!”

“Please, stop.”

“Of course!  And now, no doubt, you’ll see how important it is to grow up to carry on the family tradition!”

Edith scratched her nose.  “Sort of,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”
“Sort of.  I mean, I want to be a wildlife biologist.”
Stepford-Heimst laughed indulgently.  “Oh you clever little thing!  And that will help you become a wonderful hunter, no doubt, as long as you don’t waste too much time at school.”
“Yeah.”
“’Yes.’”

“Sure.  I mean, it helped me know how much basilisk venom to squeeze into your tea earlier, to provide a fatal dose without the taste alerting you.”
“Ah!”
“It was the dried stuff you keep in that big glass jar in the parlour, so figuring out how degraded the potency was got a bit complex.  And I had to guess at your body weight.”
“Oh!”
“Think I got it right though.  You’ve got those little red dots appearing on your hands exactly thirty minutes after ingestion.”

Stepford-Heimst did not reply.  Edith gently pushed at his side.

He fell over for good. 

He didn’t stop smiling. 

***

Edith buried most of the remains, and sold the mansion for funds to build an occultlife sanctuary.  But she had Stepford-Heimst stuffed, because he would’ve wanted it that way. 

I’ve got to admit: I was surprised when Josh walked into the breakroom, and I was surprised that I was surprised. I’ve never been one for trends, not me, but he’d been a peacock for all of the three years I’d known him and I’d been sure that I’d seen every possible permutation and mutation of style and coif that the human mind could inflict adorning his lanky frame.

This was a little different though. 

“Good morning,” I said, not wanting to cave that easily. 

“Hell yes,” said Josh earnestly, demolishing the hell out of his bagel. He never believed in chewing slowly, Josh. “Got a good day coming up.”
“Plans or gut?”
“Gut. Just feeling good, y’know?”
“Right. Right. Right.”
I sat there. He sat there.

I gave up. “Your… teeth look good.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning happily enough that I had to turn my eyes away from the two extra sabre-like canines that dangled from his upper jaw. “Thanks!”
“Caught me by surprise a bit. What’s going on there?”
“Just trying something new, you know?”

No. “Yeah.”
“Well, gotta run! Have a good day, eh?”

“Sure.”

He left, and I could stop pretending I was still hungry. It was hard to keep your appetite in the face of that much tooth.

***

Next morning was communal oatmeal, a bonding exercise and torture all in one. I’d just finished ladling out my bowl when Josh came down the stairs, whistling something and also something else. 

“What’s that?” I asked. 

“WAP,” he said cheerfully, pouring out twice what I’d taken and scraping the pot clean.
“No, not that.”
“Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”
“No, not that. How are you doing that?”

He frowned, and there was something entirely wrong about the set of his mouth. “Doing what?”
“Both of them at the same time.”
“Oh,” he said, suddenly sunny again, and he smiled properly and his lips peeled back.

“See?” he said brightly.

“Teeth,” I said.

“Right, right. And see behind them?”
Oh.  “… more teeth.”
“Right! Two rows, just like sharks used to make.”
“Why?”
“Just playing around a little, you know?”
I didn’t. “Sure.”
“Well, gotta run! See you later!”
I was still only two spoons into my oatmeal as he scooted out the door. 

***

In retrospect, the Friday morning meeting was when things began to slide out of control.

“…and in conclusion,” said Mr. Matheson, “miserable job by you all, just awful. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Except for Joshua, who has spent less than half the time of any of you on lunch breaks. Now THERE’S a productive man.”
“Gosh, thanks” said Josh happily, as all of us committed double homicide in our minds. “But I can’t take all the credit, sir. It’s my teeth.”

“Your teeth?”
“Yeah, I’ve got three rows of them right now.”
Mr. Matheson nodded in approval. “Great idea. I like it. It’s dynamic, it’s novel, it’s competitive.  I’ve got to try that.”
“Yeah! Yeah.Yeah!”
And by Monday Mr. Matheson had four rows of teeth and Josh had five and two other up-and-comers had three each. 

Lunches WERE faster, on average, but there were a godawful lot of crumbs. And from what I heard around the watercooler the local pharmacies were starting to raise their toothpaste prices. 

***

“Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.”
“Hello, Josh.” 

“You check out the shareholder’s meeting yet?”
“No, Josh.”
“Check it out, check the video. There’s video.”
“No, Josh.”
“Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease,” he said, and I had to give in because there was something about hearing a whine strained through that much dentition that made me cringe in my soul. 

It looked boring, which was normal. It sounded boring, which was normal. And then the CEO opened his mouth and.

“Is that…?”
“Yeah. Yeah! YEAH!”
“Where’s his TONGUE?”
“It’s there! See? It’s still there! He just, y’know, augmented it.”
“It’s covered in teeth!”
“Yeah! He took my idea!” Josh sounded happier than any plagiarism victim I’d ever seen. “He took my idea and ran with it! God I’m proud. I’m onto something, you know. I’m onto something BIG. Gonna push the envelope. Gonna set the trends. Watch this space, man! Watch it!”
He beamed happily and walked away and it wasn’t until he’d left my office that I realized he’d replaced everything between his chin and his cheekbones with additional molars.

***

Next Friday meeting was surreal. Mr. Matheson’s crinkled watery blue eyes stared at me above a mouth that could’ve come from a sand tiger shark; my coworkers were nests of snaggle-tooth nightmares – clearly they hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet – and Josh… Well.

Well.

Josh was ahead of the curve. 

“And you’ve all done awfully, just awfully, terrible this month. Total wreckage, waste and ruin,” said Mr. Matheson, shaking his head. “But we’re making up the time in lunch breaks which is nice. Very nice. Good job with that. A round of applause for efficient mastication! Oh and Mr. Grellis is on TIME magazine’s cover, so that’s nice. Buy a copy to show him you care.”
I didn’t buy a copy, but I did check the website. Sure enough, there was our CEO, wearing the most expensive and boring suit possible, straightening his tie and looking at the camera and just a pair of serious brown eyes buried in a face that had become nothing more than a field of enamel and dentine. 

THE FACE OF BUSINESS, it proclaimed earnestly.

“Hey!”

I looked up. “Hey, Josh.”
“You see that?”
“Yes, Josh.”
“I’m catching on!”
“Yeah, Josh.”
“I mean, they’re giving all the credit to Mr. Grellis. But as long as I know and you know who’s the cause, that’s enough right? It’s enough, right? Right? Right? Right?”
“Sure, Josh.”
“Well, gotta run! To lunch! And then run back from it! Lunch!”

He ran. To lunch. And I was grateful for it, because it’s hard to make eye contact with someone when they’ve swapped their entire skull and all its contents with teeth. 

***

By the end of the month it was on the streets. By the end of the year it was everywhere. By the end of the holidays it was step six on the VORACIOUS guidance plan to corporate efficiency and we’d just failed our audit for it. 

That Friday meeting was the worst yet. 

“Oh it’s all garbage, total ruination and disaster, nothing but awful, awful, awful,” said Mr. Matheson, shuffling some papers between his hands and masticating them into pieces. “Except for lunch breaks, where we are still absolutely killing it, just cleaning house. Except for you,” he added, pointing at me. “You’re holding us back, just strangling us. Shape up or ship out.”
“I’m shipping out,” I said. 
“Wonderful, just amazing, astounding, great,” he said wetly, saliva glistening from the serrated edges of his forehead down to the grinding surface of his chest. “You won’t be missed. Okay!  Good meeting everyone. See you after the weekend.”

“Gosh I’m sorry,” said Josh, as I cleared my desk.

“You’ve said that eleven times, Josh,” I said, pocketing my mouse. 

“Yeah but I meant it every time. It was never my intention, you know that, right?”
“Yep.”
He seemed the closest I’d ever seen him to anxious, although it was a little hard to tell since his entire body was now grinding cutting or piercing surfaces. The posture seemed right, though.  “Gosh I’m sorry.” 
“Twelve times, Josh.”
“Really? Gosh I’m sorry.”
I waited, fistful of expensive pens in hand. 

“Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m sorry. Gosh I’m gosh I gosh gosh gosgogogogogggg-”

I slapped Josh on the back, carefully. Most of it was now cutting surfaces. 

“Hurk! Thanks, buddy.”
“No problem at all, Josh.”
“I don’t know what this place’ll do without you.”
“Have faster lunches, apparently.”
“True, true. The world runs on its stomach, hahahaha.”
“Ha ha.”
“Where’re you going?” he asked as I walked down the hall, box in hands. “What’re you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ve got some ideas,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really. See you.”
“What ki-”

“See you,” I said, and I closed the elevator doors on his tie.

***

If the truth be told, I was applying to dental school. I’ve never been one for following trends, not me, but I recognize opportunity when I see it. 

I was asleep in my armchair counting dreams of productive sheep when my phone rang.  It was constable Hibblet on the other end, more’s the pity.

“Get a load of this, sir!” he said in that gormlessly enthusiastic voice of his.  “There’s been a murder!”
“Gosh,” I said.

“And it’s been done with TEETH.  Isn’t that CRAZY, sir?”
“I’ll say.  It’s almost as if the homicide department gets to see this kind of thing.  Well, call Dr.  Crobmonch immediately; if it’s been in a jaw and inside someone else’s business he’ll know it.”
“That’s the funny part, sir!”
“What is?”

***

Dr.  Paulmonius Crobmonch had been seventy-six.  He would not grow older.

This would’ve vexed him greatly had he been alive; he spent his days in careful regimens of diet and exercise, watching his vitals like a breeder with his prize pigeons.  He was all too intimately familiar with what happened when they went wrong.

Really, not having to put up with his prissy little comments on my coffee ever again was worth the murder case.  Provided we could solve it.

“Cause of death was uhhh…” I muttered, staring blankly at the shriveled old coot and wishing dearly for black coffee. 

“Bite on the throat, sir! You can tell ‘cause it’s missing.”
“Thank you, constable Hibblet.  Why don’t you go get me a coffee?”
“Oh yes sir sir sir!”

I had three minutes to think.  This would take all my concentration.  I narrowed my eyes, squinted down my nose, tightened my belt and loosened my gizzard.  When I was done with all of that I had thirty seconds left so I had to think quickly.

“Cause of death was bite on the throat,” I said crossly.  “Fine.  Whatever.”
“Oooooh does this mean we get to check dental records, sir?” asked constable Hibblet, ahead of schedule and vibrating intensely at my elbow.

“You are perfectly half-right, constable,” I said, taking my coffee from him.  “How many do we have again?”
“Oh gosh thousands sir!”
“Well, you’d better get started then.  I’ll go interview the suspects.”

***

This didn’t take long.  Dr.  Paulmonius Crobmonch had been retired for years, with no contact with former students nor coworkers.  He’d never married, never been close to the rest of his family, and saved little of his meager pension. 

The only stuff he had of any value at all was upstairs: a single room, quietly kept and well-tended, stuffed to the absolute brim with jaws, beaks, mandibles, maxilla, and teeth of every colour of the rainbow.  Fossil teeth fresh teeth big teeth little teeth miscellaneous teeth well-ordered teeth, teeth from afar and teeth from near and teeth from wherever they were.  It was impressive in a sick sort of way.  How Crobmonch had managed to sleep in the same building as the evidence of his dedication to his profession was beyond me. 

None of them were missing.  And so another potential motive was sunk beneath the waves.  I kicked back at my desk and closed my eyes and thought about teeth, sharp and jagged and

(bicuspid, the nasally voice of Dr.  Crobmonch supplied peevishly in my hindbrain)

bicuspid and all too bloody. 

Someone had bitten out this boring, tepid, solitary academic’s throat.  Awfully personal for someone with no enemies and no wealth worth speaking of. 

I poured myself a big glass of illicit.  I deserved it.

“Here’s to wherever the hell you’ve gone,” I toasted the room.  “And stay there.”
It burned going down, but sweetly.

***

“Sir! Sir! Sir oh sirry sir sir!”

I woke to constable Hibblet as no woman should: three inches away and vibrating. 

“Wussafuggoffff.”
“Sir! I have made a bold deduction and a breakthrough and MORE in our case!”

I blinked unspeakable and unidentifiable things from my eyes.  “Hmmmurrr?”
“Sir, I was thinking sir, of how the doctor, sir, of how he was our tooth expert, sir, and it occurred to me, sir, what if, sir….  what if the teeth he was bitten with WEREN’T THE MURDERER’S OWN!”
“Fwee?” I inquired.  

“Oh sir there was an entire roomful of murder implements upstairs! I’m shocked you didn’t mention it to me, sir! I brought the whole bunch downstairs and had them checked from prints and DNA and RNA and FBI profiles and anything and everything! Took all night, sir!”

I blinked.  “Wow.  That’s initiative.  You’ve done initiative, constable.  Give me the reports before you tell anyone, so that – “

“Have no fear, sir! I ran into Inspector Grablort on my way in and she was so excited when she heard that she read them all on the spot AND she wanted to come in and tell you too!”
I stared at constable Hibblet’s purely and utterly earnest face and I wondered if it was worth it.

“Sir!”

“Go away, Hibblet.  Have lunch.”
Hibblet would never, ever be worth it.  Besides, in his current state he might choke to death on his meal without outside assistance.

Inspector Grablort entered the room as he left.  She was holding handcuffs, a sidearm, and a grim expression.

I raised my eyebrow.  It didn’t happen on purpose, just went ahead and did it on its own.  Like a mallet on the kneecap. 

I’d been in awkward silences before, but this was a winner.  The seconds stretched out, each an entire meal with the in-laws. 

Grablort broke first.  “Are you going to come quietly?” she asked. 

I closed my eyes.  “Now that I never have to hear someone explain the difference between a molar and a premolar? Yes.  Very yes.  Very yes forever.”
And it wasn’t, but it was thirty years, which was close enough.  But at least nobody in the entire prison tried to talk to me about teeth. 

The alarm clock rang three times.  On the first it sang, on the second it fell over, and on the third it exploded and sent little gears every which way.

One of the which ways was Thudmaker’s nose.  A soft sigh and a shake of the head and the gear was out and Thudmaker was awake and on time, throwing off the rough sheets made from an old circus tent, putting on overalls that could hold two score and twenty men, scratching at an old scar left by a rogue bulldozer herd.

The little Thudmakers were well hard at work already, except for the littlest one, who was still in

bed, waiting for the flu medication to come, for the money for the flu medication to come.  The biggest ones had made food for the littlest ones, and the littlest ones had gone exploring in the garden-heap and found a lump of granite: a glacial erratic dropped by a careless sea of ice some millennia ago. 

It weighed one ton and it fit into Thudmaker’s beaten old lunchbox like a glove.  Thudmaker packed it, and the little Thudmakers latched it, and they swarmed around with goodbyes and kisses and a single piece of mail in their parent’s hand.  It was a postcard from the sea, who loved Thudmaker and was loved by Thudmaker but who was very busy and couldn’t stay often.  It apologized for its absence, and praised Thudmaker’s patience, and asked after the little Thudmakers and the state of the roof (if it was still missing.  It was.), and it made Thudmaker’s chest hurt a little to look at it. 

The sun was nearly up.  The day was almost begun.  Thudmaker stood up to full height, full weight, full breadth, full self, and took three steps.

The first took Thudmaker out of the house.  The second took Thudmaker out of the garden.

The third took Thudmaker into the hole. 

And Thudmaker fell.

***

Thudmaker was big, and the hole was beyond that.  There was no light to see by; there was no wind to rush through hair and teeth and eyelid; there were no walls to grip.  There was nothing but Thudmaker and the fall and the fall couldn’t end and wouldn’t end.  It hadn’t even begun, it didn’t have a middle how could it end? Past and present and future all gone in the world.

Just Thudmaker.  And the fall. 

So Thudmaker did the one thing that could be done, and took a deep, heavy breath and let it out slow, vast enough to push a tall ship, steady as a drumbeat.  It went out, and out was the wind.

Then Thudmaker did the second thing that could be done, and felt the thud, thud, thud of blood moving through arteries that submarines could rove through.  They pushed and pulled against time and tide, and time and tide was the sky. 

And Thudmaker did the third thing that could be done, and looked, really looked, really looked at all that there was that wasn’t Thudmaker and would never be Thudmaker but might someday change its mind.  And the world was there, and the hole had walls, and Thudmaker reached out an arm, strong and scaly, and caught hold and stopped the fall. 

***

The hole was still too wide to see across.  The hole was still deeper than imagining.  The hole’s walls were clammy and rough and crumbly underneath Thudmaker’s titanium nails. 

But they were there, and that was an improvement until Thudmaker looked up and saw what they were made of. 

Oh.  Oh no, Thudmaker, oh. 

The missing roof swung out from the walls in an ugly overhang, letting in wind and rain to where the little Thudmakers should feel peace and serenity.  Beside it the empty void where the sea should swim crawled against vision like a blind spot from the sun.  The missing flu medication sparkled menacingly onwards for miles, each potential grip made of razor-bladed spun-sugar frailty. 

Thudmaker’s arms were strong, and scaly, and could lift anything.  But that sight, oh the sight of that wall.  It shook and sapped muscles to gelatin; it could burn a mind down to embers with a glance.  It couldn’t be seen, and it couldn’t be ignored, and with every breath it got higher and with every thought it grew crueller and it made you want to lie down and let go and just fall. 

Thudmaker let go with one hand and reached with the other hand and felt around a bit under there was a ledge underfoot, then underbutt.  Legs dangling, back hunching, Thudmaker rooted around in one pocket, then the other pocket. 

Oh, there it was.

And Thudmaker had lunch, slowly, carefully.  One bite at a time, chewing as much as could be managed before swallowing.  Granite is hell on your digestion if you rush it, but there’s nothing like it for fuel, real fuel.  There’s age and time on every tidbit on your tongue, and ore fit to make your blood sing, and on the cusp, on the very tip of each mouthful Thudmaker took there was a little frosted sliver of time that was the effort the littlest Thudmakers had gone to, to find that lunch. 

Thudmaker finished lunch.  And then, with every eye level, with every grip carefully placed, with nothing but the present, present, Thudmaker climbed.

And climbed. 

Upwards, inevitably.  Upwards, unstoppably. 

Thudmaker climbed. 

***

Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t climb anymore.  Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t see anymore. 

Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t leave because the hole was being held down by a solid mass without mass or solidity; a stone that wasn’t; a thought that couldn’t; a hole within a hole without a matrix. 

It was Thudmaker.  It was nothing, and it weighed nothing, and it was immovable.

The hole yawned and widened just a little, gloating under Thudmaker’s feet. 

So Thudmaker reached in the other pocket. 

Nope.   That was where lunch had been.

So Thudmaker reached in one pocket, and ah, there.  There it was.

The postcard of the sea.  It was a little bent on one edge where the little Thudmakers had gotten enthusiastic. 

Thudmaker placed the postcard edge-on against the weight of nothing, and reached very carefully inside Thudmaker’s head, and pulled out a wisp of a sound: little voices, saying goodbye, saying they cared, saying they loved.

And Thudmaker tapped the little Thudmakers’ goodbyes against the sea’s postcard against the weight of nothing, and it was never there at all.

And Thudmaker pulled up, and up. 

Out of the hole. 

***

The sun was still barely rising, which made sense since the whole took place outside of time.  That was good, because there was an important thing to be done.

Thudmaker knelt down in the gravel at the road’s edge and took hold of one side of the hole with one hand, and the other side of the hole with the other hand, and brought the hands together with a firm smack. 

It was gone, and the way was safe.

Thudmaker stood up and shook a head that outweighed a streetcar and whistled through teeth that could crush cratons and started the walk into town, looking for jobs, looking for money, looking for medicine.

The hole would be there tomorrow.

But so would Thudmaker.  And it hadn’t won yet.   

The first breakfast took place in the Halls of Gibbon.  Sunlight peered through the gaps in the leaves, desperately straining to reach the endless dark of the castle’s floors where ferns and moss roiled and gnawed in the deep.  Above them squatted the scrubbers and dusters, above THEM scurried the toilers and makers, and above THEM sat the High Table of the High Court, and above all of them forever and ever sat the great pendulous bulk of the Lord Highest Brachiator, the Primate Primate, the Gibbon Supreme, Great Gibbous. 

It was a complex breakfast, but then again she was a complex being. 

First came the little leaves filled with cups of morning dew flavoured with plum juice, then a bowl filled with water from the least river, for cleaning.  A toast was offered to the High Table of the High Court, and then came the main course of small and tender skinless animals impaled on long sticks, followed by bowls of water from the lesser river, for cleaning.  Then came the eggs of birds of many sizes, followed by bowls of water from the greater river, for cleaning.  Finally a woven basket of butterflies was presented to the Gibbon Supreme, who would devour it whole before rinsing her hands in a bowl of water from the greatest river, for cleaning.

Each bowl of cleaning water was poured down into the Halls of Gibbon, where it splashed past the toilers and makers and over the scrubbers and dusters and flowed down to feed the dank and sporous depths.  They grew very well from it. 

***

The second breakfast took place some few leagues away, in the trembling earthen burrows of things that were small and squeaky.  They shuddered in their burrows at the distant hooting raucousness of the first breakfast, and many mothers counted their children carefully and cried a bit when the numbers came up short.  They fed their remainders on milk and pets and murmurs into their soft downy fur. 

The children whose mothers hadn’t come home were quiet, to save energy.  They had no breakfast.  They would never have another breakfast.  They did not know this and that was what would comfort and cradle them. 

It was not a long breakfast, but it gave you a particularly kind of slow time to think, in between pulses and throbbing at the veins, tugging on instincts found in even the mildest and shyest of creatures.  So when one mother who had only one child remaining came to her feet early and set out into the burning sunlight, others followed in their hundreds because they felt it too. 

***

The third breakfast was old ground oats turned into new soft porridge and a fresh fruit from the flowery tree that grew outside the charcoal-burner’s front door.  She took her time with it, slow and steady.  A charcoal-burner knew not to try and rush things.  That was how you got bad charcoal and worse burns. 

In the distance the throaty song of the first breakfast was reaching a crescendo.  The charcoal-burner shivered and took an extra-big bite of the fruit, to stop the thoughts, and chewed her loudest so her teeth could drown out the singing.

Because of that, she couldn’t hear the tiny noises of sharp teeth cutting into her charcoal pile. 

***

The fourth breakfast was consumed by the scrubbers and the dusters of the Halls of Gibbon, halfway from the canopy and halfway to the floor.  They were too small or too timid or too loud or too ugly or too quiet or the wrong shape, so they were kept out of sight of the noble first breakfast to scrub and dust and flinch as the bowls of cleaning water from the rivers least to greatest poured over them mingled with the red juices of the meal.

When the waters ceased, they scrubbed away the effluent.  And when the effluent ceased, they swung away in their ones and twos to the big knotted hull of a dead tree whose branches had once scraped the edge of the sky. 

Now it was mostly a trunk, and mostly a missing trunk, so it was Half-Trunk.  But it held ledges and grips and crouching-spots and its hull was filled with the spoiled fruit that was difficult to eat but easy to find that kept the bellies of the scrubbers and dusters moving for just a few days longer.  You ate what you could and you shared what you couldn’t and when the fruit had to come out you swung outside first. 

The first to swing outside first came nose to snout with the lead member of the second breakfast, who was clinging quietly to the dead branches.  The scrubber (fourth class of the major underchambres) yorped and yodled and almost fell as he came to realize the hate in her eyes and her fur and her claws and her mouth and clutched in the fiery bright coals held in her scorched feet, but he was too frightened to run and too downtrodden to fight and that helped him, because she didn’t fight him at all but bared her sharp teeth and chittered her sharp words and all around the dead broken thing of Half-Trunk came the grind and cackle of a thousand tiny fangs holding a thousand tiny sparks asking the same question a thousand times so that all the takers of the meager fourth breakfast could hear them:

Are you in?

***

There was a fifth breakfast.

It was a surprise, but received by those who could not be surprised so maybe it wasn’t.  Their heads were fiddleheads and their tails were horsetails and their mats were thick sweet moss. 

They swayed and sang down there, and as they spun in soft circles water came from above, water well after the cleaning of the first breakfast.  It was redder and thicker and stronger than anything they’d ever known, choked with ash and soot, and they drank it with a thirst to stiffen root, stalk, stem, and soul. 

On a meal like that, you could topple trees.  But they were in no rush.  There would be time. 

A slow, strong morning.  They grew exceedingly well from it. 

Time moves oddly for trees.  By and large years pass quickly, but some moments can hang on forever.
The first rainfall.  The moment when you finally overtake your neighbours and claim the full sunlight for yourself.  Living through an early cold snap that sinks right into your xylem. 

The Eld Pine saw its first offspring of its two-hundredth year clear the forest floor and push infinitesimal needles out to catch the fiery rays of the fading sun, and felt a satisfaction that sunk deep in every root and bit of bark.  It wheezed in long, slow tree joy as the breeze touched them both, and knew that it would never forget this moment.

“Whew, I’m bushed,” announced a passing lumberjack loudly.  He wiped his brow, dropped his fifty-pound pack on the Eld Pine’s seedling, and sat on its roots.  “Jumpin’ Josephat in a jiggery-pokery jumping for joy.  Gosh.  Sheesh.”

He sat there for four minutes panting, picked his nose, wiped it on the Eld Pine’s trunk, and then brushed off his pants and got up.

“I think I’ll put the cabin here,” he said aloud.

“Fuck you.”
“Pardon?”
But there was no noise but the wind in the branches, and so the lumberjack shrugged, went back to camp, returned, made a cabin, stayed overwinter, and was quite dismayed when come spring the enormous pine tree nearby toppled over and crushed his home flat, missing his bed by an inch. 

That was where it all started. 

***

 “I wonder where it all started?” asked Marta Lumbersdotter.

Her sister Jan looked up from the woodpile she lay prone upon.  “Well, that big spruce fell on Mr. Blinsky’s outhouse this morning and we had to come over real fast because he was still inside it; then while we were dealing with that the pine grove chain-topppled each other on top of the cabin one after another, and we had to deal with that because Mrs. Blinksy and the three Blinskettes were stuck in the root cellar; then we’d just finished when little Joey Cornweed came running up the road and told us that it had all been a distraction and the north field was full of maples.”
“No, no, no.  I mean, this.  When THIS all started.”
“Oh.”  Jan looked down her leg.  “Well, uh-”

“When things got so busy ‘round here.”
“-Mar –”

“I mean, I’ve been talking with Little Louise from down in Mirchburg and she said – you know what she said? – she said that they don’t have ENOUGH trees these days.  That they’ve chopped all the ones close to the village and now they need to walk half the day to find anything decent-sized!  When did ours get so crabby?”

“Say, Mar?  I thought you were talking about my leg.”
“What about your leg?”

“Logpile’s resprouted.”
Marta stopped talking and used her eyes.  “Oh.”
“Yeah.  We must’ve left a stem untrimmed.  Thing you can save it?”
Marta picked up her lumbering axe.  “Come on.  Have I missed yet?”
“Only takes one, realLY JESUS CHRIST MAR cut it a BIT close there didncha?”

***

The maple seeds swung daintily through the air, landed amidst the violence and snarl of the helicopter’s rotors, and compressed thirty years of growth into three seconds. 

For a brief moment there were two suns in the same sky above Marbledown.  One was just smaller and angrier and caused the deaths of three people. 

“Fuck in a duck’s cruck!” snarled Thelma-Lee, the deep rasp of her voice audible even over the crackle and roar of her napalm launcher.  “Chopper’s down!”
Hubert looked up from his work, one hand lodged in his first-aid satchel and the other in his comrade’s torso.  “Wait, what?”

“Chopper’s DOWN!” roared Thelma-Lee.  She swung the heavy flamethrower in a quick arc, cracking its heavy barrel across the trunk of an onrushing aspen and sent it groaning to the crumbling sidewalk.  One reinforced steeltoe slammed down on it as the other swung forward and braced, taking the backblast from the next gout of heat as she held down the weapon’s trigger.  “We’re not flying out of here!  We’re walking!  And we’re not walking!  We’re running!  Got it?”
“I got it!”
“Good, then let’s go!”
“Wait, I’m not done-”

“You said you’d got it!”
“Simpson needs-”

“Simpson died four minutes ago you stupid bastard FOLLOW ME!”

Hubert was purple with fury, but he followed her.  He followed her through the shattered concrete and overchurned asphalt and past the flaming bonfires created where big hemlock bastards had crashed through the walls and into the dark dank depths of a parking garage overrun by succulent, creeping moss hard at work undermining the foundations and pillars of a million man-hours of work and out across the pure and unfiltered hell that had overtaken downtown and crushed it to death in roots thicker than buses before the mad dash past burning suburban lawns – grasses killed dead at a hundred paces by the seeping fury of black walnuts – and the final sprint that was the Big Lot, where there was no free parking spot that wasn’t clotted to bursting with burning trees and jagged metal. 

Thelma-Lee threw her empty flamethrower into an ash’s branches without looking, took the last three strides her lungs could force her to, rolled and dropped and stopped in that order, and found herself looking down the business end of a smaller flamethrower.  It looked pretty big from that angle. 

“Holy shit.  Sergeant Thelma-Lee?”
“Sir,” she replied vaguely.  It seemed safest.

“You’re so covered in sap I nearly roasted you.  Get your ass to medical ASAP; we’re pulling out and I want you in good hands and on someone else’s feet.  Mirchburg’s the new front.”
“Get Hubert first.  He’s worse off.”
“Won’t argue,” said the blur that was probably her superior officer.  “But I wouldn’t rush on his account anymore.”
Thelma-Lee looked across the nightmare jigsaw puzzle that had been a cinema’s parking lot, and try as she might she couldn’t see a single sign of her medic. 

She tried harder.  She tried harder and harder until her knees and her eyes gave out and she woke up three days later in Mirchburg and the view outside her window was the same one she’d fallen asleep to.

Hubert still wasn’t in it.

***

“Tell us again of the olden times,” asked Charley. 

“Yes,” begged Little Su.  “Tell us of the days before the Bunker.”
“Ooooh!” squeaked Brii.  “The Sun!  The Sun!  Tell us about the Sun again!  Was it really brighter than a match?  Did it really hurt to look at it?  Did it truly sit in the sky for half your lives?”
“Yes,” mumbled Eld Peggy.  “And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  That was where they took their power from, my widdgets.  The tree-ees.  They sucked the sun from the air and it made them fierce and fast and strong and oh they took all of the Old Above apart by bits and pieces.  Only we little diggers here are left.  Only we.  Only we.  Only we.  There used to be more, you know.  More to the Bunker.”
“Beyond the Forbidden Doors?” asked Bitty Bridget in awed reverence.

“No.  Past West.”
“But there’s nothing past west!”
“No,” said Eld Peggy.  “Not anymore.  They took it.  The tree-ees do not come down here in person, oh no.  But their fingers are deep and strong and they come farther than you’d-”

She cocked her head and frowned.

“What?” asked Little Su.
“Shush,” said Eld Peggy.  And then: “oh no.  Oh dear.  All of you get everyone and go through the Forbidden Doors.  Take any food you can carry on the way but do not stop running.  Now start running.”
Charley picked up Eld Peggy.  She protested but had no strength to stop the younger woman, and in her darkest depths she was thankful for it when she saw the first roots burst through the bunker walls behind her.

***

The last ape vanished across the river, and for the first time in centuries no words were spoken aloud in that place.

Branches stilled, moved by nothing more than the wind.  Leaves rustled without purpose or malicious intent.  Roots reached for water alone. 

“What was THAT all about?” asked an old, old, old, old hickory. 

A gnarled elm, its trunk scarred by flames in ages past, shook gently as a rainstorm passed.  “I never asked.  I think an evergreen started it.”

“Conifers, eh?”
“What was that?” inquired a nearby sequoia. 

“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
And then there were no more words at all.  Just woods. 

“I’m SO excited,” said Gracie.

“I know,” said Harry.  One arm was at the wheel; the other clutched the car door as if afraid it would fly away without him. 

“I mean, you’ll get to see the family!”
“I’ve met your family.”
“Yeah, but like, REALLY see them.  The great goose is when the town really comes alive, y’know?”
“Sure,” said Harry. 

“And I mean you can feel the difference in everyone.  You’re going to love it so much.”
“Yeah.  Hey, where do we park?”
“Oh just up ahead and turn right.”
“That’s a field.”
“Yeah!  The McClures let people park in it during the great goose.”
“This is a new car,” said Harry in a very patient and understanding voice that was more filled with hate than any mere venomous sneer. 
“Oh it’ll be fine, it’s all clean!  Come on, we’ve got to get in before the lines are too long if you want to grab a big sausage!”
“Pardon?”
“You’ll see!  You’ll love it SO much!”

***

The lines were thirty deep and two wide.

“Oh good we’re still early!” said Gracie.

“Great,” said Harry.  “You can get us these.  I’m going to go get us beer.”
“It’s a little early in the day for that, and-”

“Three hour car drive, it’s late enough for beer.”
“Okay sweetie.  What do you want on your sausage?”
“Nothing.”
“Plain?”
“I don’t want one,” said Harry.  And he was off, trudging into the dewy post-dawn greyness of a drizzly day in a coat that was NOT a rain jacket.

Nobody was selling umbrellas. 

“Getting a bit damp happens,” said Gracie when she found him again an hour and forty-nine minutes later, sitting on a particularly uncomfortable rock underneath a fall-dappled tree.  “It’s all part of the fun.  Here’s your sausage!”
“I don’t want a sausage,” said Harry. 

“It’s a local special.  See?  They hollow out the baguette and put it right in there.  All home-made, delicious!  And it was only five dollars.”
“You have mine.”
“It’s got onions in it.”
“I hate onions.”
“You’ll love them like this if you try them.  And all the rest, I’m sure – there’s like a thousand things to do here!”
“Great,” said Harry.  “Great.  Great.”
The tree bent gently in the wind and dropped a bucket of water on him. 

***

A thousand things were indeed available at the Galviston goose festival.  Provided you were willing to count each of them a few times each. 

There were carnival games, which Harry said were a waste of money.  Gracie won him a little teddy bear, which he quietly threw out when she was in the toilets. 

There were toilets, arranged in neat rows and rows and rows.  Harry went in the bushes and was accosted by an irate parent for being next to the playground. 

There were playgrounds and bouncy castles for the young and for the parents to have a quiet smoke.  Gracie asked Harry how he felt about kids again, and he pretended he was suffering from earwax buildup again. 

There was a first-aid tent, well-stocked.  Harry slipped the guy a twenty to say he’d cleaned out his earwax, and got a lollypop into the bargain.  He gave it to Gracie, and that kept her mouth shut until they reached her parents.

There were Gracie’s whole family, cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats, all of them loud and happy and cheering and urging them to get into the good seats they’d gotten right at the front of the pier, overlooking the corn barge.

There was the corn barge.

“What the hell is this?” asked Harry.

“It’s the corn barge!” explained Gracie. 

“Great,” said Harry.  “When are we eating it?”

The Great Goose touched down at the other end of the lake. 

***

It was a small event in the grand scheme of things, but in the local scheme of things that meant a brief but spirited twelve-foot swell that set the corn-barge slamming against the docks like a gong, a gale that stripped the red-and-orange leaves from the trees, and Harry’s heart nearly stopping in his chest. 

“WONK,” said the Great Goose.  It paddled gently forwards, crossing the entire lake in about four seconds.  “WONK.”
“Holy fucking shit piss Christ fuck,” said Harry. 
“Language,” giggled Gracie.  She nudged him.  “I told you this’d be great!  How you like the Great Graviston Goose Festival now, eh?”
“How does nobody KNOW about this thing?”
“WONK,” said the Great Goose, who was investigating the corn-barge cautiously.  It rearranged all its feathers three times. 

“Well, we try to keep it zipped.  Nobody wants it getting popped by a hunter, right?”
“With what, a fucking cannon?  Jesus Gracie.  What the hell is wrong with this place?”
“Oh, nothing you haven’t already seen,” she said airily. 

“What if it gets cranky?  We’re leaving.”

“Sure!  It’s about done now anyways.”  Gracie’s little hand smoothed down the back of his jacket one last time.  “Anything else?” she asked.  “Another sausage?  More popcorn?  A beer?”
“Just shut up for a moment,” he muttered.  His eyes felt like they were too big for his skull. 

“Alrighty!” she said, and gave a little shove with that little hand, helped by a few anonymous arms from various cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, parents, siblings, grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, and god-knows-whats. 

“Farewell, sweetie!” she sang out. 

“Hooray!” cheered the crowds.

“WONK,” thundered the Great Goose.

“mmlrooph,” mumbled Harry through litres and litres of corn, buried head-first. 

“WONK,” replied the Great Goose.  And then it reached down and bit Harry and twisted, and it bit Harry and twisted, and it bit and twisted and bit and twisted until there wasn’t really anything left.  It nibbled aggressively at the corn bin for twenty minutes before a rapturous audience, ruffled its feathers, shook its wings, and – filled with spite and maize – produced a single, glorious pellet of barely-digested poop. 

Then it said “WONK,” and took off again. 

The feces were carted away and praised and prayed over and spread over the fields for a good harvest, that sort of thing. 

Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) sat on a broken stalagmite, scratched her shoulders under the shawl she’d made of half her best gown, gazed upon the broken and jagged stones of Kalamity Peak, and pondered upon the pros and cons of being violently abducted by a dragon on her eighteenth birthday. 

Well, she didn’t have to wear her best gown anymore.  The damned thing had almost stifled her to death before the dragon’s claws had pierced several of its mainstays, gaffs and booms as she was plucked up from the Tsaress of Ammygdala’s garden. 

The dragon’s name was Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  Madeleina had asked her if she could shorten it to ‘Rxix,’ or better yet, ‘Rix.’  She had been denied this. 

Learning how to fend for herself on the greatest of the Shattered Trinity peaks had been exhilarating.  Madeleina had never imagined herself so happy to snap a rabbit’s neck with her bare hands, or so cunning at finding fresh wild onions growing in the finger-deep soil in the lee of a boulder. 

So on the whole things seemed to almost be more good than bad.  But the way Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar kept offhandedly informing Madeleina she was going to eat her… well.  She could do without that.  It made the whole affair a bit sour to her mouth. 

Oh right!  That reminded her.  It had been five minutes (counted by heartbeats; Madeleina had always had a nice even pulse since she was a child), and it was time to flip the little rabbit steaks where they sizzled on the flattest stone she could find, placed close enough to the fire that the flames almost licked it salaciously. 

The second side would move much more quickly. 

Onions, onions, little green onion sprouts, and the biggest safest mushroom she’d found (bless her childhood tutor and her odd fascination with fungi), all sizzling merrily away in what little fat she’d scraped off the sides of the poor rabbit.  Good thing they were well away from winter. 

Browned all.  As good a crust as she could make without iron.  Bless the days she’d spent eavesdropping on the kitchens, bless her father’s inattentiveness to her studies when she was a child, and bless the palate of Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar be fond of coneys. 

And as she thought of the devil, so she appeared.  There were many words and many ways to conceptualize the arrival of the dragon, of her scale and of her scope and of her span and so on, but perhaps the most clear way to encompass her in the moment of her landing was a single word that wasn’t a word at all, and that word was

WHOOOOMP.
“Now what have you been up to this time?” asked Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  She sniffed, a surprisingly delicate affectation, but then again Madeleina  had learned after four or five escape attempts that she had a nose that made a bloodhound look like an elder with a head-cold.   “Smells burned.  Promising!”
“The onions are CHARRED,” said Madeleina  with a severity that she took from her chaperone and knew full well would have no effect. 

“Synonyms, synonyms, synonyms,” chanted the dragon.  “And who is this for?”
“Why, you,” said Madeleina .  “In hopes that you’ll find something tastier for your plate than Crown Princess.”
“I have no plates.”
“Palate, then,” said Madeleina .  “Go on.  It’s just finished.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she scooped up the meat,  the mushrooms, the onions, the rocks they were cooking on, the entire campfire, and very nearly Madeleina if she hadn’t fallen over backwords, then she tipped the whole lot into her maw and swallowed once. 

“Hmm,” she said.  “Hmm.  Mpph.  Ack.  Well, a bit crunchy and tasteless.  Promising hint of warmth, but not much substance to it.  I think I’d rather still eat you, sorry.”
“You weren’t meant to eat the stones,” said Madeleina crossly. 

“What, surely you didn’t intend  for me to consume the meat alone?” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar in astonishment.  “That little thing?”
“It wasn’t a small rabbit.”

“Princess, princess, princess,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar solemnly, shaking her head that was bigger than a plough-horse, shark-jagged teeth still shedding crushed granite.  “There ARE no big rabbits.”
“Perhaps there are no big Crown Princesses either,” said Madeleina. 

“Big enough,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, as she eeled her way down, down, down into the dark chasms of the cave, where no light would disturb her nap.  “Big enough.”

***

The next day, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, and may there be others after her), went hunting. 

And the next day.

And the next.

And the next day she went again and finally found something, which (bless the slow digestion of dragons) was just in time.  It was an elk come up the mountain slopes to feed on the little summer meadows in full flower downslope from where Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar did her business (volcanic ash was a wonder for plants it seemed), and it was majestic and alert and entirely unprepared for a very small but targeted landslide. 

Madeleina had learned a lot of very specific geological facts in her time on the peaks.  Where to put her feet and when had been number one. 

Digging the elk out was hard, but it was nicely tenderized and not too badly mangled.  She dragged it upslope an inch at a time. 

There were no scavengers.  Predators kept well out of the way of a dragon’s scent. 

The liver, the kidneys, the heart, all separated and chopped and minced as best as she could with a knife made from a stone-sharpened snapped femur, then boiled in its stomach, in a wooden bowl filled with fire-heated stones. 

The meat of the flank and the haunch and the shoulder and the ribs and EVERYWHERE, cut free in flaps and sliced and scorched senseless on the thinnest, flattest, hottest rocks she could find. 

The application of what few herbs she could pluck from the meadow that probably weren’t poisonous, along with a very few, very small, very hot little peppers that she’d sampled herself and determined to be as close to human-inedible as any fruit could be. 

It wasn’t a feast, but it was more than she’d have ever thought she’d managed, with less than she’d ever dreamed of having. 

“I smell meat,” said the dragon’s voice, rich and thunderous and wrapping around Madeleina like a velvet blanket.  “And blood.  And oh my that’s a LOT of blood.  Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” said Madeleina, who’d scrubbed off as best as she could in the little cave-stream. 

“Good.  Now, what is this?”
“Elk haggis,” said Madeleina.  “And elk…” Steak?  Roast?  Rump?  Chuck?  Shoulder?  “…bits,” she decided on. 

“What’s haggis?”
“A bit of everything.”
“What a good idea,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar, and she plucked up the haggis and the roasted meats and put them all in her mouth, moved her tongue in a curious manner, swallowed, and spat out the basket. 

“Well!” she said in a pleased way.  “That’s certainly better than raw, I’ve got to say.  Now I see a use for this cooking besides satisfying your sad little stomachs.”
“Would you like more?” asked Madeleina. 
“Not quite as much as I’d like to eat you,” sighed Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “But it was close!”
“Really?”
“Well.  Maybe not THAT close,” admitted the dragon.  And she curled up quite tightly and went to sleep immediately with a satisfied little grunt. 

***

Four days later Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name, god willing, not the last) had found four tough little mountain potatoes and a long-dead grouse that had perished in a crevice out of reach of fox and crow and stoat but not, alas, of ants. 

She watched the sun rise and had never seen anything more fully in her life, hungry and cold and depressed as she was.  It spreads its rays across the Shattered Trinity, and across the far green lands her father ruled, and all the way to the world rolling away beyond her sight and past. 

It was a lovely place.  Pity she’d not get to see more of it.   Pity she’d never learned more about foraging, or hunting, or cooking.  Pity that Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar wanted to eat a princess so badly.  But there was precious little space in that sunlight for pity or regret or the future so Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name) cleared her throat and said the following:

“I, Crown Princess Madeleina Von de Compte Schwanmept Rupert Twissy (third of her name), hereby renounce my title, my peerage, my stature, my family, my crown, my birthright, and all other particulars.”

She shut her eyes tight for a minute, then risked opening one a crack.

The sunrise was still very pretty.

So Madeleina sat and watched it for a long, long time until the stones behind her crackled and crunched and ground away under the great rolling gut of a dragon’s passing. 

“Hmm!” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar sharply.  “Hmm!  What have YOU been doing?”
“Nothing much,” said Madeleina, truthfully. 

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar.  “That doesn’t SMELL like nothing.  You’ve done something.  Come on, tell me.”
“I’ve renounced my title,” said Madeleina.

“Oh wyrmtitties,” said the dragon in the crossest voice Madeleina had ever heard.  “No wonder.  Ugh, you’re all off now.  Nothing there but hard work and sweat.  If I wanted peasant I have villages close by, and I never have and never will.  Bah.  Bah!”

“You… wanted to eat me just for my title?” asked Madeleina.

The dragon snorted and the ceiling shook.  “Certainly,” she said.  “It’s where all the sweet and spice comes from.  Fancy living and soft lives and cushy money make for tender flesh, you know – but nothing adds to flavour like wealth and power.”
“Then why take me?” asked Madeleina.  “You plunged down to my father’s first summer ball of the year!  The gardens of Borjeport are SWARMING with the titled gentry!  You could’ve had a double handful of earls and countesses for breakfast every day for the past two weeks!”
Rxixghorashclaclajermorashahexamalcrar looked at her.  “You mean to say… there are nobility that aren’t princesses?”
“Yes.”
“Or royalty in general?”
“Yes!”
The dragon stared into the sun.  “Perhaps…” she ventured cautiously “even the untitled can live like nobles?”
“Some of them.”
“And they will be at these summer balls?”
“Absolutely.”
“Wonderful.  I’ll be home tonight.  Feel free to be about your business.”

WHOOOOMP.

Madeleina, first and probably last of her name (she’d never been very fond of it, or the grandmother who’d insisted on it), watched the dragon fly until her wings faded away in  the vast blue of the morning sky. 

Well. 

Perhaps it was for the best that she’d never been terribly fond of high society. 

I looked out my bedroom window.  First mistake of the day. 

Up above me, the skies poured down vaporwave rainwater, broken only by the passing shelter of a zeppelin’s underbelly.  Down below people shook hands and spoke of shares and futures as they stepped over the bodies of the corporateless in the gutters, and there was a McDonalds in every hand.  And across the interstate I saw the face of some gutless unshaven slob staring back at me in the reflective glass of a skyscraper. 

Just another day on the mean streets of the 20^th century, where freedom reigned and there was a world war around every corner.  I took a long drag on my breakfast cigar.  GMO marijuana, of course – the real stuff was hard to come by ever since the Cuban embargo kicked in – and I brooded on how sick I was of this life with the help of this morning’s paper.  Hitler, Mussolini, Archduke Ferdinand, and Vader… I was sick of war.  I’d done my time back in the trenches of Vietnam and now I couldn’t sleep for memories of the A-bombs going off inside my brains. 

My doorbell rang, my door slammed open, and in walked Trouble, first name Big middle name Time.  She was a platinum blonde flapper with a suit whose shoulder pads could’ve cut the eyes from an unwary passerby or a handsy coworker without blinking. 

“Mister Bogart?” she inquired. 

“Just ‘Schwarzenegger’ is fine,” I told her.  You don’t stand on ceremony when you’re talking to someone from C-level.  This was a corporate class dame if I’d ever spotted one, and she had the hard and spiked look in her eyes of someone who’d clawed their way into it by force rather than birth, who’d placed coke plants with her own two hands and personally funded disinformation on smoking health hazards.  In her mother’s day she would’ve harpooned whales. 

“Good.  I’m here for a delicate situation, and a little bat told me you’re just the man for it.”
“Then you can call me by my maiden name instead,” I said.  “’Discreet.’”

“Wonderful.  There’s been a murder and the police aren’t investigating it.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“My husband.”
I didn’t frown, but it took concentration.  I’d been sent on  a lot of wild pigeon chases by spouses too desperate to believe that a loved one’s death was an honest accident.  “Any suspects?”

“Oh, I killed him,” said the C-level airily.  “I just need you to prove it.”

My cigar stub vanished somewhere into the 50-yen shag linoleum carpet.  I didn’t notice.  I didn’t care.  I barely managed my first question, which was “huh?”
“I’m Vice President Hunter S. Margaret Atwood,” said the dame with a smile you could’ve sharpened a bowie knife on, “and I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, Schwarzenegger Discreet Bogart.”

***

First things first, I ziptied her to a chair.  She helped. 

“Spill the beans, sister,” I told her.  “What’s your angle here?”
“Why, I have no angle whatsoever, Schwarzenegger,” she said innocently.  “Simply report my deeds to the police with enough evidence to support my claims.  They’ve denied me so far.  I will hire you for a retaining fee of a hundred Euros a day, plus expenses.”
A man could get pretty far on that money.  But there was something at work here I didn’t trust.  “Why’d you do it?” I demanded.  “President George Roosevelt was the highest in the polls since William Churchill.”

“Oh, I loved him so,” she said.  “But it had to be done.  This country’s new wars will not be over worlds, or even stars like Mr. Vader believes, but over temperature gradients.  I knew the field was too important to be left unattended.  So did my husband.  But we…disagreed on policy.  And now that he’s dead, I myself am president of the United Nations of Americas.  There’s just one problem…”
“No body?”

“No body!” she spat at me.  “The slippery pigfucker tripped and fell down the garbage disposal in our kitchen after I slit his throat.  And until he’s proven dead, I’m the vice president.  Only the president can declare a new war!”

“Damn,” I mused.  “Profit preserve us, this is a pretty pronounced pickle we’re facing here.  Did his x-files survive?”
“No.  The disposal left only meat and mangled polyester.  Not even his credit card was left intact.”

This was getting intense.  “I’m going out for a smoke,” I told her.  “Be back in a minute.”
Then I stepped outside my door, pulled out my matches, and lost consciousness. 

***

When I woke it was in a murky haze that reminded me of Vietnam, where I’d left so many of my friends behind in Flander’s Fields. 

“Rise and shine, gaijin” said a man’s mouth next to my ear in a heaven Texish accent.  I tried to turn my head and couldn’t because I was tied down at wrist and ankle. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mister Bogart,” sneered the voice, which I’d heard a hundred hundred times on national radio. 

“Thanks for not killing me instead,” I said.  It was a bluff: the ache in my skull had brought last week’s hangover back from the grave twice as strong and twice as vengeful. 

“Don’t mention it, hombre,” said the voice, and its owner walked around in front of me and sat down on a backwards-facing chair like he was in a video about to warn high schoolers not to inhale LSD. 

There he was, two hundred pounds and six foot five, in a cowboy hat and a thousand-dime suit: ‘Big’ Billiam Gates, the biggest carbon-lord the fossilized fuels industry had ever seen.  Personally pulling a pair of wire cutters out of his pocket to fuck me up.  Some people would’ve killed to be in my position. 

“So, what’s gotten a bee in your bonnet, Billy?” I asked. 

“You’ve been in cahoots with the vice president,” he said.  “I bet I know what lies she poured in your ears.  Told you all about the glorious future of temperature warfare, didn’t she?  Told you about how she’s going to make a grillion dollars for every Amersican man, woman, and dog by sending the thermometer industry through the stratosphere and to the moon?”

“No,” I said, half-truthfully.  It didn’t matter.  One of the many things Big Billiam had enjoyed for much of his life was not having to pay attention to anything anyone said to him. 

“Well, that putz is full of shit and full of smarts.  Yeah, the future isn’t in world wars or space wars, and it even has a role to play in temperature.  But she thinks it’s gonna be cold.  Ice cold.  She’ll have us packing parkas and stuffing stockings and winterizing roads until the end of time.  Me?  I’ve seen the way we’re headed.  My Model-T and Windows XP are just the start: the whole world is going to run on a carbon economy sooner or later.  And when we do that?  Things are going to heat up.  She wants a cold war, but I say things are going to get HOT.”
“You’re insane,” I told him.  “Nobody’s going to happily sign up to cook themselves and  the  entire rest of the planet to death just  so you can make a few bucks.”
“Believe what you like, schweinhund,” he smiled.  “With you here the vice president will never ascend to the throne…and will never start her cold war.  Instead, me and my friend  here will get our way.  Isn’t that right, comrade Reagan?”
I would’ve gasped if my lungs weren’t fluttering desperately for air.  Instead I could merely stare, wide-eyed, as the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of the California stepped into the room. 

“Indeedy it is old chap pip pip,” he said.  “Jolly good.  Arigato much for having me toodle-oo over here.  I say I say what shall we do with this fella here wot wot?”

“He knows too much,” said Gates.  “Let’s throw him out for the thylacines.  A last meal before we raise the temperature and it floods all of Australia, eh mon ami?”

“Fuck you,” I said weekly as I was wheeled over to the door.

“Dasvidaniya, ya son of a bitch,” chuckled Gates. 

And then the door flew off its hinges.  Behind it stood fourteen RAF SWAT officers, armed to the teeth with punji sticks and mustard gasses.  At their head stood the smirking figure of my old boss. 

“Alright, gentlemen, what seems to be the problem here?” asked FBIA director J. Edgar Nixon. 

One more inch, just one more, and I’d have worked my left hand free off the cuffs.  My right pocket protector held a PDA, a pen, and a pen that was actually a knife.  Any of them would be better than nothing at a time like this. 

That was when the white phosphorous bomb went off.  With a roaring groan, the great mass of the CN Tower began to slide away beneath our feet, suspending us over the bottomless abyss of the Grand Canyon.  My entire life flashed before my eyes from infancy during the Boer War to the icy plains of Northern Vietnam in my tragically cut-short teenage years to the freshly-constructed Death Star taking shape even now in the skies above New York and I knew that I’d seen too many wars…

…but if I acted fast, I could still stop this one before the Y2K crash. 

TO BE CONTINUED IN VOLUME  XXXIII OF 20^th CENTURY ACTION STORIES!  REAL HISTORY!  REAL ACTION!  REAL GOOD!