The Dark Issue 24: The Dark, #24

By A.M. Muffaz, Samantha Henderson, Eliza Victoria and Damien Angelica Walters

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Edited by award winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and brought to you by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

“The Bone Beaters” by A.M. Muffaz
“The Lark Ascending” by Samantha Henderson (reprint)
“Queen Midnight” by Eliza Victoria
“When We Taste of Death” by Damien Angelica Walters (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Apr 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386506409

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 24 • May 2017

The Bone Beaters by A.M. Muffaz

The Lark Ascending by Samantha Henderson

Queen Midnight by Eliza Victoria

When We Taste of Death by Damien Angelica Walters

Cover Art: The House in the Desert by Vincent Chong

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2017 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Bone Beaters

by A.M. Muffaz

Tentzin urged his yak up the mountain before dawn, high above the prayer flags and incense cauldrons of the staging grounds. It was spring, but too early for funerals to be conducted. Those who died over the winter would need to be brought up the mountain soon, or the weather would get too warm.

He brought flour, salt and tea for the family at the top of the mountain. During the peak season, his cargo would be the dead and their offerings. But the food would still be eaten in whatever form it came.

Travelling alongside, cheek-to-cheek, were trains of chariots carved into the rock. Readying their bows at fleet-footed goa, the riders allowed their horses to lead the way. Every creature depicted—man, horse or antelope—ran unbridled from the earth.

In the stories that his ancestors told, the mountain was a stairway to the Great Plains beyond. It was the home and sustenance of the living, so that they could climb ever higher into the clouds. His job, ushering the dead to their final resting place, was little more than giving away what was no longer needed.

Nesting even farther above him, in the crevices under the sharpest cliffs, the griffons guarded their newly hatched young. The growing chicks would soon be hungry. Within weeks, the first corpses would be very much welcomed.

Before midday, the land before him broadened into a plateau edged on three sides by the sky. Coarse grass thrust out of the last snow, yellowed as the mud-crusted bones that poked out of the landscape here and there.

A sound like cracking wood caught his attention, rising and falling in tandem with the plodding of the yak. The path they followed smoothed to a plain dirt rut. By the wayside, a young man squatted above a pile of bones, a large leg bone in one hand, which he used to hammer and split the smaller bones at his feet. Some of the splinters were old and hollow. Others were leftovers from the start of winter, still with frostbitten meat clinging to the edges.

Dolgo, he called. Already at work this early?

Dolgo looked up with a wide grin, guffawed loudly as he nodded, and cheerfully resumed cracking bones.

Where’s your father? At home?

Dolgo nodded with a grunt, this time not bothering to look up.

Further up the path, the caretaker’s stone hut huddled against the flatness. The scratches in the door were so old they had smoothed down into the wood. A skin hung from the lintel, heavy with milk. Next to the hut stood a shabby lean-to for the goats, a wooden pole to tie up the dog at night, and the half-frozen sticks of last year’s kitchen garden.

From the hut emerged the last bride Tentzin brought up the mountain, the only other provision he had ever brought here. The bride was an orphan who came of age just as the caretaker’s previous wife died. Tashi was flat-faced and ruddy-skinned, with a sharp nose and bright eyes. All the way up here, she was a beauty.

O Tashi, wife of a good man. How fare you this morning? he called.

I am well. Has your season been good? she replied. Her voice was papery as sand. As always, she barely smiled.

The season has been kind. Has the spring been peaceful for you?

She shrugged. The sun has been warm and the skies clear. How fares your family?

They are well. How fares your family?

They too are well.

The requisite greetings out of the way, Tashi helped him unload his yak in silence. Off in a distance, the clacking of bones continued.

She had not been thin, but Tentzin thought she seemed plumper than when he last saw her. Many things could happen in three months. Maybe it was the extra shawls she wore over her robe.

Where is your husband? he asked.

He led the goats to pasture this morning, she said, hoisting the bag of salt onto her shoulder. "Come inside and have