Strange New Words: Tales of Heroism, Hi-jinks, and Horror

By Ari Marmell

In Strange New Words, let Ari Marmell guide you through over a dozen windows into the fantastic. Heroes, horrors, and hijinks await you, including:

“The Cemetery Wyrm”: A childish fascination with the old, pitted monument was understandable, but not the ongoing obsession—or his certainty that the effigy was something more . . .

“The Purloined Ledger”: In the early days of the Great Depression, a PI who is far more than he appears must outwit a gangster whose efforts may have turned to sorcery.

“The Shaman’s Tale”: Why do the proud and warlike orcs serve always as the minions, never the master? The answer lies in the mists of the oldest orcish legends . . . A brand new story set in the world of The Goblin Corps!

“Railroad Spikes”: He thought the train was easy pickings, treasure ripe for the taking. He was very, very wrong. Saw meets The Great Train Robbery in a steampunk Wild West.

“The Rubies of Olun-Zeth”: In a brutal, vicious land ruled by brutal, vicious gods, Lathaan the Heretic knows that the promise of treasure is a promise rarely kept. But what if . . . ?

“Big Apple, Small Serpent”: Loosed from the confines of her tiny world, this little Egyptian cobra was never going back to her exhibit. She was free, and would remain so—no matter what it took.

“Reaver”: Was the evil in the ship that had grounded itself on Lincaster’s docks, or had it always festered in Lincaster itself? A full-length novelette.

“Twenty-One-Oh”: In a dystopian future of all-power corporations, missing a deadline on even a simple delivery can cost you a lot more than just your job . . .

“Tithe”: It is a theme common to the tales told every girl and boy of the fairy courts: Never trust a bargain made with the tricky and treacherous human race.

“Than to Serve in Heaven”: It was an offer even Lucifer couldn’t pass up. Still, through it all, he wondered, and the angels with him. Why would God put him in charge of Heaven?

“The Ogre’s Pride”: Unlike his bloodthirsty brethren, Davro the ogre just wanted to be left in peace. Still, some insults cannot be ignored, and some things are always worth fighting for.

“In Deepest Silence”: The USS San Jacinto should have been prepared for anything in the ocean’s depths—but you cannot prepare for what cannot exist!

“One Solitary Scale”: Only the sculptor himself knew he had traded his soul for his talent. Now he had found a way to break that bargain, but had he merely traded one Hell for another?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ari Marmell
• Release date: Nov 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310161483

Book preview

Other Works by Ari Marmell

The Corvis Rebaine Series

The Conqueror’s Shadow

The Warlord’s Legacy

The Widdershins Adventures Series

Thief’s Covenant

False Covenant

Lost Covenant

The Mick Oberon Series

Hot Lead, Cold Iron (forthcoming)

Other Novels

The Goblin Corps

Gehenna: the Final Night (a Vampire: the Masquerade tie-in novel)

Agents of Artifice (a Magic the Gathering tie-in novel)

The Abomination Vault (a Darksiders tie-in novel)

In Thunder Forged (an Iron Kingdoms tie-in novel)

For more up-to-date information and releases, as well as links to several additional pieces of free fiction, visit http://www.mouseferatu.com, or find Ari on Twitter @mouseferatu.

Strange New Words

Tales of Heroism, Hi-jinks, and Horror

Ari Marmell

Copyright 2013 by Ari Marmell

Individual stories © Ari Marmell, excluding the Far West setting elements appearing in Railroad Spikes. All Far West setting elements are © 2011, Adamant Entertainment, and are used with permission.

Cover Art by Galen Dara

Stories original to Strange New Words edited by Miranda Horner

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 978-1-31016-148-3

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Words in a Certain Order

The Cemetery Wyrm

The Purloined Ledger

The Shaman’s Tale

Railroad Spikes

The Rubies of Olun-Zeth

Big Apple, Small Serpent

Reaver

Twenty-One-Oh

Tithe

Than to Serve in Heaven

The Ogre’s Pride

In Deepest Silence

One Solitary Scale

Appendix A: Tropes of the Trade

Special Thanks

About the Author

Publication History

Words, in a Certain Order

A Rambling Introduction

TRUTH IS, I never really intended to write all that many short stories.

I’ve been telling stories—in the form of a few scrawled notebook pages or the plots of Dungeons & Dragons games—since, oh, late elementary school. I’ve known I wanted to do it professionally since the end of my freshman year of college. (In part because I loved doing so, and in part because I just pretty much sucked at everything else I tried.) But for as long as I’d been trying to write words for other people to see, I’d been trying—and wanting—to write novels.

Even in one of my creative writing classes at the University of Houston, where everyone else was bringing in a short story every week, I was bringing in a chapter of ongoing novel. Oh, I certainly did write my share of short stories in college, when I was assigned to, but it was always something I had to do, not something I wanted to do.

I got my start in professional writing, a few years after college, working in the role-playing game industry. I’d always loved gaming, and it was work I loved doing—especially since I’d spent many school years studying/majoring in D&D, rather than more insignificant subjects like history or math—but I also knew I still wanted to branch out into fiction.

I was still thinking solely of novels at that point, but that’s not what presented itself. Those of you familiar with White Wolf’s (and now Onyx Path’s) World of Darkness RPGs may recall that many of them begin with a scene-setting piece of short fiction. Well, someone has to write those (a disappointment to hear, I’m sure, for all of you who were certain they sprang full-grown from Justin Achilli’s word processor like the Microsoft talking paperclip). That someone, in several books, wound up being me. And then I had opportunities to submit to this collection, or an invitation to that anthology, and...

And honestly? Not all my early stories were that good. Just like I had to write a few learning experience novels before any of them even became salvageable, let alone publishable, same was true here. Eugie Foster, award-winning short story author and a good friend, once told me, You write short stories like a novelist. And she’s right; it really is a very different skill. Knowing one can help with the other, but it can also hinder if you’re not careful. (See Reaver, as an example. Despite being the longest piece in this book—technically a novelette, rather than a short story—there are still those who would suggest it has too many characters. I disagree, but I can certainly see where they’re coming from.)

Point to all this is, even after I got good at writing short stories, I never expected to have enough for a collection. Opportunities kept coming up, though, ideas kept bubbling to the surface—those damn things have a mind of their own—and then one day, I looked up and there they were. And since there they were, well, here they are.

Strange New Words (and if I have to explain where that title comes from, do please say high to the sleestaks for me when you return to the Land of the Lost) is, if nothing else, eclectic. Fantasy—sword and sorcery, dark, and urban—makes up the bulk of it, but we’ve also got cyberpunk, straight-up horror, mythology, and a couple I wouldn’t entirely know how to categorize. First person, third person, past tense, present tense, hopeful, nihilistic...By word count, about half the book is original, the other half reprints of stories that have appeared scattered across various periodicals and anthologies, many of which had different purposes or requirements.

Basically, if you’re looking for a consistent theme throughout, I think the only one you’ll find is Ari wrote these.

My hope is, that’s enough.

The Cemetery Wyrm

"The Cemetery Wyrm" isn’t quite my normal style, which is, of course, a perfectly logical reason to put it first. (My logic is unlike yours.) It’s a dark fantasy, but also a tale of creeping obsession, stretching out over a longer period than most of my short stories tend to cover. Bit of trivia for you, this story’s earliest draft was written as a tale for the Ravenloft® D&D setting. When the project in which I’d hoped to include it failed to materialize, I reworked it to remove it from that setting and make it entirely my own.

HE WAS A child the first time he saw the dragon.

Throughout his youngest years, Mother and Father had spent every daylight hour working the fields and orchards. Times were difficult: the winters were harsh, the summers brought fewer showers every year. It was all they, or their neighbors, could do to survive. So he had often been left in the care of his grandfather, who was too old for such labors.

He loved his grandfather dearly, and he’d been heartbroken the morning he awoke to Mother’s sobs, and to Father telling him, gentle and moist-eyed, that Grandpa was gone. He didn’t truly comprehend this thing called death, not at his age, but he understood enough to know his grandfather would not, could not, come back to him.

Although they thought him too young, he begged his parents to let him attend the funeral, to say his own goodbyes to Grandpa. Eventually, perhaps merely to silence him so they might make their preparations, they acquiesced.

And so, on that dreary, windy morn, he donned his finest, as Grandpa would have wanted: The shoes only mildly scuffed at the toe and with but a single hole worn through the bottom, and the coat patched only at the elbows and along one side. (It wasn’t as nice as Ronas’s outfit, but then, Ronas was the older brother. He always had the newer clothes.) Thus decked out, he solemnly followed the small procession, wishing he was large enough to help carry the casket.

Their destination was Mount Blessed. Adults, he knew, often associated death with blessing, perhaps trying to make themselves feel better. It was fifteen minutes’ walk from the edge of town, for the cemetery was shared by all communities of the valley and sat roughly between them. He’d never been there before, and he couldn’t help but think as they approached that it was misnamed twice over: that it was not a mount anymore than it was blessed. It might most generously be termed a hill, wider by far than it was tall.

A rusty iron fence, teetering like Grandpa’s teeth had done, surrounded the mound. At the gate stood a fellow who seemed, to the boy’s youthful eyes, impossibly tall and gangly, a sapling wearing a suit made of man. The stranger, leaning against a wheelbarrow bristling with rakes and shovels, doffed his ragged hat as the procession passed.

From the road, the hillside appeared to sprout both tombstones and trees, neither displaying much sense of order or preplanning. He stood quietly behind his father’s legs, peeking past to watch the priest utter his empty words, while large, sweaty men he didn’t know lowered the wooden box into what seemed a bottomless pit. He cried at first, comforted only a little by Mother’s hand atop his head. As the ceremony dragged on, however, and the priest’s words grew ever less meaningful, his childish nature overcame even his grief. He began to shift from side to side, and then to fidget. Finally, recognizing that he would not immediately be missed, and not wishing to disturb his parents or his brother in their sorrow, he slipped from Mother’s side and wandered about the hill, examining every tree and practicing his letters by sounding out the names of the departed inscribed upon the stones. Grandpa would have liked that.

Gradually, in a way that he was sure most adults would dismiss as his childish fancy, he came to realize that he was not alone. From behind him, something watched.

A bit nervous, perhaps, but not especially frightened, he turned. Uphill he saw a heavy copse of trees, one of the thickest on Mount Blessed. Curtains of moss dangled from the branches, and thick ropes of ivy linked bole to bole. The grass grew tall around those trees, almost tall enough to hide in without crouching, and the weeds grew taller still.

Whatever watched him lurked within that shadowed overgrowth.

He took a few steps, mindful of protecting his good shoes. As he closed the distance, his vision adjusted and he began to make it out. He saw—

Eyes! Eyes that glared. Teeth protruding from a fanged and gaping maw. It was going to eat him, swallow him whole, like the ogres and witches in Grandpa’s stories! It—

It was stone. That was all. Just stone.

Laughing at his childish fancy (he liked that phrase, childish fancy, since it suggested that it was the fancy and not he himself that was childish), he pushed aside a layer of the overgrowth and stood on tiptoes for a better look.

Except for its obtruding snout, it was almost invisible, covered by layers of dirt and ivy, dulled by Heaven-alone-knew how many years of nature’s disdain—but long examination and youthful imagination began to fill in the gaps.

It was a dragon, that much he knew, for some of Grandpa’s favorite tales had spoken of the knights of old and the fearsome beasts from whom they rescued fair damsels. It stood, or rather stooped, atop a great pedestal, also stone. It crouched forward, as though clambering from its position of honor. Powerful rear legs clung tight to the stone, and its tail wrapped three times or more around the pillar, but the rest of its body snaked outward and down. Its wings were half unfurled, perhaps to give it balance, and it had no front claws at all, for its arms seemed to reach deep into the face of the pedestal itself.

It overlooked another monument or, as he realized was more likely, an extension of the same one. A slab stretched out before the dragon, resembling the casket in which Grandpa had been buried, but far heavier. It, too, was entangled in heavy growth and tendrils of ivy. He couldn’t help but feel that the earth itself was trying to pull it down into the soil.

Long he remained as the rest of the world dropped away, his own living eyes locked in a continual stare with slitted pupils of unblinking stone. It was magnificent, unlike anything he had ever seen, but he imagined it was only the palest shadow of what it once had been.

Who could possibly lie here? Why had he never heard of someone so clearly important, either from his own village or those nearby? Surely Grandpa had deserved such a thing, if anyone did. And why would such a wondrous monument be left untended to grow chipped and dull, filthy and overgrown?

Mother’s frantic call broke the spell, and he ran back down the gentle slope. But with every third step, he glanced behind, even when the curve of the earth and the wall of trees had long since obscured his view.

Over the following months, his grief for Grandpa faded, though he knew it would never vanish entirely. The dragon, however, remained clear, etched into the back of his eyelids. He dreamed of it, just often enough that its memory remained ever fresh. At odd moments of the day, he wondered about it: Who was buried there? Why? The questions, the monument, all swirled together in his thoughts, until they assumed the aspect of a living thing, until he almost believed that if he could just make his way back to Mount Blessed, he might ask the dragon directly.

He told his older brother Ronas of it, and their friends Selmette and Jarie from down the road. He delighted in their awe at his discovery, fascinated, though Ronas, as expected, pretended to shrug it off, unwilling to display any sort of excitement to him. For a time, it became a private game. On cold or rainy days they would sit indoors and concoct wild guesses about the man or woman entombed beneath the dragon’s gaze. Sometimes the person was a royal prince, banished from home by some vile governess; sometimes a virginal maiden who had pined away for her lost love; sometimes a horrific creature, a blood-drinking or flesh-eating ghoul, and the dragon ever guarded against its reemergence into the land of the living.

When the weather permitted outdoor play, they were instead a band of knights, determined to overcome the foul beast and recover the bones of the hero it had unjustly slain; or else intrepid explorers, who sought answers to great mysteries at the feet of the draconic oracle.

But none of the others had actually seen the cemetery wyrm, for the children were forbidden from going so far unescorted. Slowly their interest began to fade. First Ronas, then Selmette, and finally even Jarie found newer pastimes to while away the days, and he had to keep up with them if he didn’t want to be left on his own.

Eventually, even his own fascination with the monument, though impressively long-lived for childhood fancy, faded away. Every so often, on restless nights when the sky came over gray and the winds blew chill, he might dream of the dragon, but otherwise he put it aside and moved on to other things.

Others died over the ensuing years: friends of the family, neighbors, eventually even Father. And each time, as he stood amidst the mourners, he felt a faint prickling upon the back of his neck. He always wanted to turn and look, but he never did. He was older now, nearly an adult in his own right; it was time to devote his attention to adult things.

At his own father’s funeral, he stepped up when the priest finished, for he had elected to speak about the man who had helped to give him life, and who had labored and struggled to ensure his family wanted for little.

Yet his mouth refused to form the words; his eyes refused to focus. Here, standing at the head of the grave, where the stone would soon be planted, he stared straight into that copse of trees. And though he knew it impossible, knew that the angle was all wrong, he could not rid himself of the notion that, from those deep shadows, the dragon stared back.

Shamefaced, he walked away without uttering a word, leaving others to mutter sadly at how hard his father’s death must have hit the poor young man.

Some nights later, he was back.

For the first time, he came to Mount Blessed alone and not for any funeral, though he stopped long enough to pay respects to Father. Instead, he came for his own sake, his own curiosity. The dreams had returned in force since he had failed to speak at Father’s grave, and whether it was guilt over his own weakness that brought them on or some deeper, obsessive need returned from childhood, he intended to satisfy it.

The overgrowth was, if anything, worse than his childhood memories had suggested. Even in the near-decade gone by, nobody had lifted so much as a finger or a spade in the monument’s defense. Thorns and rough leaves scratched at his flesh as he pushed his way through, far less tentatively than he had as a child. Roots and vines caught at his shoes and threatened more than once to turn an ankle.

The monument appeared before him, and he almost wept to see it. The stone, which he knew now to be marble, was grayed and chipped, a sin when committed against such a marvelous piece of work. And it was marvelous indeed: In every detail, the dragon was perfect. The sculptor, whoever that genius might have been, had carved each separate scale into its armored hide. Its eyes seemed capable of movement, its wings and tail promising that, at any moment, they would twitch with signs of life.

And all of it coated in a film of filth, wrapped in moss and ivy, worn down by rain. It was a travesty, the saddest thing in this field of beloved dead.

As when he was younger, his eyes locked with its own. Long he stared, but not too long, for he had things to do. With a slight bow of his head, a show of respect and even apology to the marble drake, he knelt carefully before it. He had insufficient room to kneel between the dragon’s pedestal and the marble sepulcher, so he positioned himself just to the side.

As he suspected, the marble between the dragon’s arms, where its claws sank into the stone, was smoother than the rest. Here, behind a concealing veil of ivy, he would find the name of the tomb’s occupant and learn the mysterious identity that had so long vexed him.

No!

His voice was a lament, his frustration a burning sting as chapped and thorn-bitten hands brushed away the clinging greenery. For the marble beneath was blank. Although set aside in a smooth square of stone clearly intended for inscription, it bore no such thing, no mark of any sort. The tomb remained as nameless as its occupant.

You! Boy! You get away from there!

He started at the sound. A man, still blinking sleep from his eyes, came running up the hill, a large spade clutched in both hands like a weapon. The fellow was tall, reed-thin. It was the same groundskeeper, he realized, that he had seen as a child in his first visit to Mount Blessed.

It felt it unlikely that the fellow would be interested in offering him the chance to explain why he was creeping through the graves in the dark of night. And so he was gone, counting on his younger legs to grant him the edge in any race, the iron fence of the cemetery soon fading into the distance behind him.

He had to know, now; acknowledged that it had become an obsession, even as he continued his efforts. Had to know the name of the anonymous fellow buried beneath the lurking dragon. Multiple midnight visits to the cemetery, each stealthier than the first, yielded no further clues. No inscription hid elsewhere on the pedestal, nor had one been present once and then simply worn away, to be revealed by a careful chalk rubbing; the marble was too smooth, roughened only by the elements rather than any tool of man.

It did not take over his life, no, nothing that severe. He apprenticed to the town’s silversmith, showing great promise in the creation of jewelry and tiny works of art, and continued to work his family fields on occasion, when Mother requested he pitch in. He gamed and jested and drank with Ronas and Selmette (Jarie’s family had moved away some years before), and in all public respects, he lived a normal, quiet, difficult, but satisfying existence.

Every few weeks, though, when the sky turned murky, the dreams returned. Then he would awaken and walk through the dark to the cemetery, as though compelled by