Excerpts: Horizon Calling
An Historical Fantasy novel set at the dawning of the American Revolution. It tells the adventures of an English officer who finds his life's plans dismantled and his loyalties called into question when he is hunted by an undead horror from the bottom of the sea.
It begins when the light finds the cold and lonely pit where Mother had died.
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She’d drifted, broken, down some distant time past to settle at the bleak, bare belly of the sea. Her soft meat had long since been pecked away by the beaks of reckless Stargazers and Boxcrabs but the thick armor plates that had shorn so many spearheads from their grips did also keep safe the greater margin of her body from the appetites of deep things blasphemous and starving. Eventually this sheltered flesh calcified against the bedrock stone. Three dozen lifetimes covered her in layers of seagrass and algae until, at last, it became impossible to tell her apart from her grave. She was gone. A part of the whole.
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But now, the light.
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It burns a hole into the pit of her gullet and leaves a splinter of itself behind, right in the core of her being, calling too sweetly to be ignored even by the dead. She answers. There is a pressure in this dark place. A sucking, then a dull thud so loud that the nearest fish scatter themselves to hide in wispy cribs of serene medusa and cramped halls of sea-floor stone. Seven centuries of slow fusion come apart in a single moment of violence. A wicked pincer raises from the plumes of dustwater. There is a second jolt; a second claw torn free. Flecks of lichen and coral stone swirl in black water as slowly, miserably, Mother tears herself out from the abyss of death.
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The tumult subsides. The saltwater clears. She is free.
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Years of black and dreamless sleep fall from her memory. They cannot help her to survive; to hunt, so her mind rejects them. They would only be clutter. She blinks to clear the painful grime from her vision and her ruined eye refuses to close around a hunk of metal still lodged there, in the soft tissue. Great hunks of exposed torso are missing. Many of her softer limbs are bitten off and frayed at the stump. A long, wicked scar runs across her ruined egg-sac.
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She is a ragged, shambledown thing, but she is alive. And she is hungry.
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The light is far above, skimming across the surface where even now black clouds were blooming. It is trapped inside a great wooden shell that she does not know is called a ship, filled with a hundred scrambling, feeble things she does not know are called men. She rises to watch them flee the brewing storm. Her one good eye laps at the surface, cold and cruel. She does not know what these things are called. She has no need of names. She remembers what they are, without them.
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She’d broke many ships before, when she was strong and whole, and ships were smaller things. She’d eaten the men huddled inside. Until the last one. It was these strange beasts had stolen her womb; had even as she broke them and dragged them down drove their wicked spears into her face.
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It was these frail things had killed her.
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The ship runs, fast as the wind allows, making for Gibraltar. The wider sea. Mother is unconcerned. So long as they swim in her waters she will find them. First, she must eat.
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She submerges, leaving behind the patter of the growing rain and lets the deeper currents carry her where they will. Squinting around the corroded iron tooth still lodged in her eye, she closes herself off to the world. Sits in the blackness of her own mind.
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Slowly, quiet at first, Mother begins to sing. Her song grows; swells to a piercing crescendo and runs out in every direction to tell her what it sees there. A shoal of nervous scad somewhere southward, disturbed from their susurration by the squeal of the song. Something bigger nearby. Something unconcerned. The lazy prowl of a shark?
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It would be enough. She would eat and grow strong. Then she would leave this place that had become her tomb forever. She would find the light that had called her back to life; the light that was calling to her even now, distance be damned. There was a needle of white fire in her gut, begging her to come home. Begging her to make herself whole.
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Mother opens her eyes. She twists her bulk around to aim herself toward the skulking shark. It has been a long time since she’s gotten to hunt. She does not want easy prey.
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With a burst of expelled saltwater, she’s gone. She cuts through the swelling sea with the silent ease of a killer’s knife, ceaseless on the scent of her quarry.
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She flies, and the storm follows with her.
Boston woke to damp-dark shingles and slick street stones. The young sun was hid behind a black sheet--flat storm clouds hung over the bay like a seabird sat patiently for its meal. A thousand trailing twins of smoke erupted from the chimneys of the town as decent folk shook cold from their limbs and got their days going.
The smell of daybroken Boston was of fresh wood in the stove and cold salt air.
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On King Street soldiers woke in bunks, pulling on woolen coats and well-worn gloves between sips of dark beer and bites of cold bread. Yawning clerks and red-eyed bookkeepers forced the groaning gears of state into service.
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In the Neck, farmers woke to cocks-crows screeched from interlacing vines of calabash and pumpkin. Sow and dam alike came leisurely to their watering holes to chase the night-drought from their mouths.
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Citywide; print-men, tinsmiths, bloomers, milliners, bookbinders, tablewrights, and a hundred other sorts of artisan and worker slipped the locks of their shops and bloomed the steady din of life into the city.
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Down the docks rough stevedores crawled from whatever hole they’d found in the night to do three men’s work for the price of one. Beggar dogs found rats to break their fast. Good-for-naughts and wastrels alike paid no heed to the dawn. Their days were had at darker hours.
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A chandler who lived off the boardwalk woke to find that her husband had not come home from the wharf that night. Her heart was hot with betrayal today, but by tomorrow it would be heavy with grief. She was not the first to feel so this season and would not be the last.
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It was here, above her home, in the room she let to the Crown for a humble sum that hope slept heavy in a bed of bile. The lone tenant of that sad apartment had woke before dawn of the sharp pain in his leg. It was that way every morning—especially when there’d been rain. He pulled himself over to the lip of his bed and with some coaxing got the leg to forget a piece of its stiffness and relent itself to some small use. He rose. It was a victory that rankled of defeat. He had pease porridge to fill his belly and made tea with a moderate dose of his dwindling laudanum. By the time he’d made it down his stairs, the rest of Boston was wide awake.
Quade was becoming a problem.
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Frost dumped his uneaten pie in the gutter. Maybe some mangy street child would find it and it would do some good for the overcrowding, at least. Quade hadn’t been hungry again today. Frost had tried every trick he knew to kill the son-of-a-bitch kindly. No matter. He was moving on soon. He could afford to be messy on this one. His thoughts drifted idly from knives, to blackjacks, to the length of concertina wire he’d been holding on to for just such an occasion. A smile graced the pocked and bulbous jowls of the killer’s face. That would teach the bastard not to make him work for it.
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Angry or not, Frost kept rigorously to his patterns. Two different coaches before he walked home, a stop at the grocers’ and then out the back, stoop down at the doorway to check his hair...still there! All was well. Safe for another day, and there weren’t many more that needed to pass before he was on the road and away from this rotten, cold city. Three, he thought. One for the killing, one to sell everything off, and one more to book proper accommodation. Aloysius Frost wouldn’t hit the road on foot like a kicked cur. He’d ride in a gentleman's style.
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Door unlocked, he slipped inside without delay. His wide, parson’s hat was hung on a coat rack and the cassock came quickly after it. He stuck a crooked finger up his collar and flicked the stiff, white cuff unceremoniously onto the floor. For the first time since he’d left this morning, he could breath easy. Damn thing always felt like being choked by an invalid.
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Gods were such tiresome things.
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Free of his fetters, he donned a more comfortable housecoat and shuffled down the hallway to put on a kettle. Past the tall mirror, trimmed in gold leaf. Past the little mahogany table that a dead Dutchwoman had bought in a Rotterdam woodwright’s shop. Out into the sitting room with the wingback chair and the dark-wood shelves and the paraffin lamp turned low. Past the Kashmir rug and the ebony hutch and the little Davenport where he did his correspondence. He really would miss this place.
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“Hello. Francis.”
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Frost’s blood ran cold. His chair had spoken to him. Called him Francis. That was a dead name. A name with no loose ends, or so he’d thought. He turned slowly, and saw someone sitting in his chair, nestled in the shadowy corner, unnoticed.
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“Sorry,” said the voice. A woman’s voice. “I forgot. You go by Reese, now.”
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“How did you get in here?”
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The woman in the shadows didn’t answer. She only reached out and set a straw spill alight on the dwindling flame of the lamp. As she lit her pipe, every stoking puff gave Frost a quick, red glimpse of dark, scarred features and unforgiving, unblinking eyes. In that last, at least, it was like looking in a mirror. Only now in the extra burst of light did Frost notice the vestigial little window that looked out onto a brick wall. How it was sitting dishonest in its frame. How twin veins of paint had been scraped up from the sill. He’d gotten complacent. Careless.
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“That was how I got to you,” she said when the pipe was full-rolling. “That name. It was your only real mistake. Don’t take it too hard. It’s bound to happen eventually in your line of business.”
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She dropped her match onto the rug and watched him. He couldn’t help but notice she was unarmed.
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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, laying a hand to the lapel of his coat. He always kept a boot pistol in the breast pocket. Just in case.
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“No need for that, friend,” she said, and for a moment Frost was worried she’d seen his ruse. “Your game’s been played, and it’s time to pay up. No point in lying now.”
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“You think that I’m lying?” Frost asked, playing for time. All he needed was to get a hand in that pocket.
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Echo nodded. “About that name, for one. Reese. See, Quade wasn’t sure about you ‘til then. He ain’t like me. He wants to know we’re on the right track before the lead starts flying. And there just wasn’t any way to know--to be sure, you see--until you used that name. The name of your last victim.”
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Frost sucked his teeth. Idiot. He’d forgotten where the name had come from.
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“Yeah,” the woman agreed. “That was when we knew we had you.”
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“You were the one who interrupted me,” Frost realized. The time for pretense was clearly passed, and his fingers played at the lip of his pocket. “With the Sergeant.”
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“You got me there, but it all comes out in the wash, don’t it?”
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“Who are you?” he asked.
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“Name’s Echo,” she shrugged. Probably assumed there was no danger in giving names out to a man with his head in a noose. “I do some odd jobs for the Gaol--cleaning up messes and the like. They caught scent of you last summer. Some woman name of Sampson.”
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“The one with all the cats,” Frost hissed. “Childless.”
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Echo shook her head.
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“Estranged,” she corrected. “Don’t figure the handful of shillings she left behind meant much to you. Not in the grand scheme of this here operation,” she said swinging an arm around his well-furnished sitting room.
“But it sure meant a lot to a farmer with a lean harvest and when it come up missing he had questions and no will left behind to answer them. He dug her up and found a heart like spent coal.”
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Frost swore.
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“Like I said, bound to happen eventually.”
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“So. What happens next?”
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“Well,” she said, and tapped her bowl out in his lamp, “you and me are off for a little stroll down the Gaol. I’ll get paid and you’ll get a place to spend the night. I expect in the morning they’ll hang you.”
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As she spoke, Frost watched the flaming spill catch and smolder on the rug. As the smoke rose up, so too did his anger. Not at her. At himself. He’d made so many little mistakes. Worse, he’d been lazy. He’d be more careful next time. This embarrassment would never happen again. He nodded to the fire blooming at Echo’s feet.
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“You’ve caught my carpet aflame,” he said sternly.
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“A funny thing to spend your concern on, friend. You won’t be seeing it again.”
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“Still.”
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Echo shrugged and bent slowly to hock a stout gobbet of smoke-stained spittle onto the rug. The flame sizzled and in that split second that she turned her eyes down to aim her spitwad Frost plunged a hand into his coat pocket and pulled out the little boot pistol. Echo brought her gaze back up to mark the gun’s barrel where it eyed the soft hollow of her temple.
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“I wouldn’t,” she told Frost. One hand was creeping back behind the chair.
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“No,” he said. “I expect not,” and pulled the trigger.
