This August, it’s a short story spun from a single image month – we share a group picture, and everyone writes a bit of flash fiction. Enjoy!!
Parker Broaddus
Author of A Hero’s Curse & Nightrage Rising
Stoppering Death
You would be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into an apothecary. Or an herbalist’s shop. It was actually a dead man’s home. If you could call it a home.
A single room occupied the back of the junk and trinket shop, Treasures and Troves, where the proprietor, Janey Muld, allowed, (or had allowed until very recently), Thadeous “Gutrot” Flynnder to live, in exchange for some small rent payment, (more often forgotten by both than not).
“Gutrot” Flynnder made a meager living doling out herbs, medicines and cures for everything from warts to the more severe and deadly cases of “blueface.” He never set a price. Whatever the widow, or tramp, or jobless father from the Wayfair could afford. Which was often nothing. His remedies, unlike his finances, often hit the mark. This might have surprised anyone who cared to take notice, but hardly anyone except the hopeless even knew “Gutrot” Flynnder’s name, much less where he could be found.
Hardly anyone.
Which means, almost no-one.
Which really means, someone.
***
Jergin Haps was not well loved. Even his own mother blew out her lips and narrowed her eyes when she saw his shock of straw poke in through the front door if he happened to be in the neighborhood around dinnertime. But she fed him all the same, although now she mostly shipped him off with a chunk of bread, or sometimes some bit of meat, if the washing she took in had paid nicely that week.
She couldn’t stand the pitiful stories he put on her with his red rimmed eyes, when she knew good and well that he could be working a nice job if he wanted it. There were plenty who couldn’t make it in the capitol city of Plen. Feeble of body or mind. Jergin wasn’t one of them. He mightn’t be the brightest candle out of the set, but he could accomplish a task if he wanted. But he tried, he said. They didn’t like him at the stables. The floor manager at the palace threw him out, after just half a day on staff. The security sergeant on the river patrol was against him.
She had heard it all. Her lips pressed into a thin line. The fact was, she knew why they didn’t like him at the stables. Henry had told her that one. “Yer boys lazy, shiftless, an’ hankerin’ fer a fight.” He shrugged. “We tried, Marta. Mean streak to ‘im too. In a sneaky sort o’ way.” He didn’t explain any more, but she knew. A mother knows. So she wouldn’t turn him away when his tangled mess of hair sauntered in, but she didn’t let him linger either. She would give him a decent lashing with her eyes, and scold him with silence. Once that was done she turned her back on him. His invitation to leave.
***
Jergin browsed through the junk in Treasures and Troves, doing his best to look interested. He picked up an object that momentarily caught his eye, but instead of a fun bauble, he realized it was nothing more than the base to a candlestick holder. With the handle broken off. He flicked it back into the bin of assorted junk impatiently. Janey Muld, the proud, wrinkled, owner of Treasures and Troves, as well as every relic on display, clicked her tongue disapprovingly. Jergin scowled before sloping off to another display. The front bell rang and one of Muld’s favorites came through the front door. As wide as she was tall the little woman greeted Muld expansively and the two dove into a fast exchange of gossip. Just the distraction Jergin wanted.
He slipped behind the curtain that separated the store from the hall that led to the tiny room in back. Like a shadow he darted through the hall. The door at the end leaned open a fraction, sagging on mismatched hinges. He oozed through the crack and took it in.
Just as his contact had described. Rows of tiny bottles lined the walls, along with dusty old books and a few scraps of notes. A small cot took up half the space. There was no lamp. A dirty window let in yellow sunshine. He snorted quietly. There was nothing here worth what his contact had paid him. Up front. And twice that much later. He shook his head. Whoever lived in this cramped space didn’t have that kind of shiny. But he ran his eyes along the rows of ingredients and stoppered glass as instructed. The long spidery handwriting was difficult to decipher. But it didn’t matter. He would have known the one even without the name. His eyes danced past it, but were pulled back again, as if it was magnetized. It had been pushed back, a little behind the others. The contents weren’t just dark – many of the bottles boasted some unappealing mixture of dark looking ingredients – this one was more like shadow. Or darkness itself. His fingers trembled a little as he plucked it from its spot. The contents moved, but not in the way they should. Almost like a living thing. He pushed the label up with his thumb. His mouth was dry. He wrapped it in a silver cloth, given for the purpose, and pushed it into his pocket. Then he shivered, like a dog shaking water out of its coat. A deep breath and he was gone. He shimmied out, through the hall, across the shop, and out the door without even catching Muld’s milky eye.
***
Long spider-like fingers closed over the silver cloth and the whole disappeared into the rich, elaborate robes reserved for the Arcane Academy’s top advisors. Advisor, really, as there was currently only one. Jergin felt better immediately. He’d felt like he had been carrying an anvil around. His smarmy smile came back and his chest puffed up a couple of notches. He was about to get paid more than he’d ever been paid in his life. About time.
And yet, the long fingers weren’t plying him with coins. Jergin coughed, politely. He could afford to be magnanimous. “My fee?”
“Ahhh.” Eyes like needles twinkled at him from deep in a shadowy hood. “The money.”
“Of course, if it’s too much, we could do payments,” Jergin smiled even wider. “There may be some small interest.”
“Oh, the money is no object.”
Yet there was no move toward pockets, or a scrambling for a purse.
No apologies for the delay, or an attempt to rebargain the price.
Jergin’s neck tingled. He rubbed it impatiently. They were all against him. They were jealous. That was it. That he could get things, do things, that they couldn’t. That he could –
***
The long robe whispered down the night-wrapped streets of Plen, turning just before entering the dull splash of light thrown by a stuttering street lantern. The robe melded into the shadows of an alley, found a door, unlocked it and disappeared down a flight of steps, slithering underneath Plen like a so many other unpleasant things. In the darkness beneath the city a match was struck. Eager hands opened the silver cloth and dancing eyes peered at the tiny bottle. Old Gutrot had scrawled a label with shaky hands.
Dusk ?
The robe giggled, white teeth appearing in the hood. The fingers lovingly tore the offending question mark off the label, where it fluttered to the floor.
(Want to read more about Plen? Check out this introduction, or catch the full story here!)
Robin Lythgoe
Author of As the Crow Flies
We Are Not Friends
Smoke and the stink of rotten eggs shrouded the Issves te Ergint encampment. Thin, powdery ash drifted in eddies, settling over buildings, camp tents, wagons, hitching posts. Men… Despite the season, soldiers wore scarves over their faces, wet to stifle the fumes and poison. Ergint jidoma, the natives called it. Live silver. Invaluable to the rich and powerful; death to those forced to extract the stuff from the bowels of the earth.
Heat challenged winter’s bitter cold as the nearby mining town died in fierce shades of red, orange, bronze. Mostly red. It was foolish to set fire to wood permeated with poisonous dust. Or so the Dog thought as he strode between rows of gray- and vermilion-streaked canvas…
Patricia Reding
Author of Oathtaker
Calico Dew and the Vial of Duplicate Sin
by Patricia Reding
Copyright Patricia Reding 2020
Calico held back a chuckle as a memory bubbled up of her younger brother, River, calling the local cemetery a “skeleton park,” but then she quickly grew serious again as she continued, tiptoeing her way through the Graveyard of the Devout.
Stopping occasionally to hide behind a marble statue or concrete monument …
Here’s my favorite line (and that’s saying something, since there are so many good ones!):
Which really means, someone.
Thanks for that!
OOoo, another Plen story, how fun! I hope there’s going to be more of it, because this was just too short!