The Long Past & Other Stories Read online

  The Long Past

  & Other Stories

  by Ginn Hale

  Published by:

  Blind Eye Books

  1141 Grant Street

  Bellingham WA 98225

  blindeyebooks.com

  Edited by Nicole Kimberling

  Copyedited by Anne Scott

  Cover Illustration by Gwen Toevs

  Interior Illustrations by Dawn Kimberling

  This is a work of fiction and all events, characters, and portrayals are either fictious or used fictiously.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permision of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus first appeared in the Magic & Mayhem anthology from GRNW Press 2016.

  An earlier edit of Get Lucky first appeared in the Once Upon a Time in the Weird West anthology from Dreamspinner Press 2016.

  First Edition October 2017

  Copyright © Ginn Hale 2017

  Printed in the United States

  Print ISBN: 978-1-935560-51-7

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-935560-52-4

  World Map

  MAP 1864

  MAP 1896

  The Long Past

  Chapter One

  Colorado Territory 1864

  High up in the clear blue sky, a group of pterosaurs swept past the red-and-white-striped balloon of an approaching airship. The gull-sized creatures soared through the dirigible’s wake and then dived towards dark waters far below.

  Grover watched the wily green pterosaurs descend to snatch silver-sided fish from the waves of the Inland Sea then go flapping back towards their roosts in the sea-swept cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. His attention returned to the star-spangled airship with its brassy gondola. The ship hadn’t yet crossed through the gray haze of the spell dome. It arched up from the alchemically fortified walls of the city and kept out most anything bigger than a songbird. Even across the distance and through the distortion, Grover thought he could make out the gold sun-shaped insignia of the US Office of Theurgy and Magicum on the gondola’s prow.

  Theurgist professors, soldiers and maybe even a mage floated up there. All of them coming here to investigate the big blue sea that had flooded the states and territories from Kansas to the Gulf of Mexico.

  The High Plains had transformed into a seabed. The foothills of the Rocky Mountains had become a chain of islands dotting the blue water, while high peaks now stood like a vast, great levee. As the waters had spread, so had lush fern jungles and the strange, old creatures that inhabited both.

  Land and lives had been lost, and Fort Arvada had been inundated with refugees. And yet after six years, this single airship was all the aid the federal government sent. Grover just hoped they’d brought plenty of powdered alchemic stone. The city’s fortifications had been uprooted and stretched thin as paper to enclose as much farmland as possible, but the spells were old and growing weaker with every season.

  Soon nothing would stand between the farmers of Fort Arvada and the old creatures.

  Back on the bandstand, the musicians indulged in a final practice of their jubilant welcome to the visiting dignitaries while the gathered crowd peered up at the sky. Grover briefly spotted his cousin Frank, looking sharp despite having his nine-year-old daughter balanced on his shoulders. She waved her rag doll at the sky.

  Up on the bandstand Mayor Wilder anxiously leafed through the pages of his speech. Mrs. Cora Cody and several other society women straightened their patchwork dresses and smiled at each other like they were about to attend their first dances. Then Cora turned to her husband, George, and straightened his beaver pelt top hat. Miss Xu Song shouted gleefully from the crowd that she could see the airship. Hundreds of men hooted and whooped.

  From his post within the church steeple, Grover studied the expanse of cloud drifting across the blue sky. A ghostly pale wing dipped down from the white billows. Grover hefted his rifle and tracked the huge silvery pterosaur.

  “Thunderbird,” Toby Cody whispered from beside him. The spindly ginger youth worked the focus of his spyglass. “Holy Moses! It’s a big’un, Grove.”

  Grover continued to follow the beast through the sight of his rifle. Its silver membranous wings stretched a good thirty feet across. Sunlight glinted along the saber-sharp beak. Squinting, Grover could just make out the jet-black eyes and that slight curve that lent all thunderbirds the appearance of smiling slyly down on the rest of the world.

  It swooped into a killing dive and Toby gasped. A shot rang out from spiked turret on the roof of the bank and then two more. Sheriff Lee shooting, like some greenhorn, at a target too far to hit. The sheer size of thunderbirds always made them appear closer than they were. Grover kept watching the huge pterosaur—a female, he guessed from the muted gold color of her skull crest. Such grace and speed flowed through even the slightest flick of her wings.

  “Grove.” Toby’s voice rose with nervous alarm. He didn’t grasp Grover’s arm, but he sounded like he wanted to. “Grove, she’s close to the airship!”

  “They got plenty of spells and guns of their own.” Grover kept his eyes on the thunderbird’s angle of descent. It was like watching an arrow in flight. “Anyhow that thunderbird ain’t interested in them. She’s after a mountain goat.”

  Sheriff Lee fired again, and this time managed to wing the airship’s gondola.

  “Oh Lord,” Toby whispered as the airship’s cannon ports swung open and cannon barrels angled down toward the welcoming crowd gathered in the city square.

  The thunderbird snatched a white goat in her massive jaws and swooped up, soaring across the mountain face to claim a perch on a distant cliff. Likely she was young, and keeping out of her elders’ territories by nesting along the city’s fortifications. Come fall she might grow bolder. It would do to keep track of her, if she remained in the area.

  Meanwhile, on the open ground of the square the hundreds of folk, all turned out in their Sunday best, stood frozen staring up at the airship’s glinting long guns.

  Toby’s blonde aunt, Cora, rose to her feet on the bandstand. The blue ribbons festooning her yellow hat and dress wavered in the breeze as she started to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”. The band struck up after her, and soon the entire crowd joined in, belting out the anthem. In response the airship’s cannons retracted and the gunports fell closed.

  The massive dirigible descended, its alchemic engines droning over the gathered crowd. Blue light flared as it passed through the spell dome. Federal airmen dropped ropes and slithered down them to secure the lines to the ground. As they hauled the airship down, Toby looked to Grover and grinned.

  “You read that thunderbird like the Bible, Grove.”

  Grover shrugged but indulged the youth with a smile.

  At ten, Toby was still more in awe of Grover’s sharpshooting and tracking skills than he was aware of him as a Black man. Even that didn’t mean what it would have once, not with slave states from Texas to Georgia and down to Florida underwater. Blacks, Whites, Indians, Mexicans, even Chinese—they were all refugees in the mountains now, and for six years the people of Fort Arvada had only had one another to trust in and rely upon.

  “You figure them federals are gonna put everything back to how it was before?” Toby asked.

  “Stranger things happen, I reckon,” Grover replied. Though he wasn’t sure how he felt about returning to an age of cotton fields and plantations. He’d take floods and dinosaurs any day if it meant an end to pattyrollers and slave catchers.


  “You think they brought sacks of magic dust with ’em?”

  “Sure they have.” How much they’d charge for the ground alchemic stone was another matter, but Grover figured that if anyone could bluff, bluster and charm a load of federal bigwigs it would be Mayor Wilder.

  “Do you suppose one of them’s a real live mage?” Toby leaned against the steeple railing and studied the line of uniformed men descending the gold stairs of the airship gondola. Grover followed the boy’s gaze. He took in the two slender white men both sporting blond mutton-chop sideburns and top hats. Not much of interest to see there, aside from the fact they appeared to be twins. An emaciated, gray-haired woman wearing a mink jacket and a massive sapphire dress over a cage crinoline followed them. The mourning band sewn to her coat sleeve displayed the Union Jack often worn by the English diaspora. Grover wondered if she was one of those lady mages who’d forfeited her title to practice magic legally in the US. Or maybe she’d fled to escape the floods in England and France. She looked old as iron and hard enough to split flint with her glare.

  A fourth figure stepped down from the stairs and started towards the bandstand where Mayor Wilder stood waiting. For an instant Grover felt like his eyes failed him. As the tall, lean man approached the bandstand, the mayor’s composure faltered. His lined, pale face flushed, and he grinned like a joyous child. Cora Cody, on the other hand, paled noticeably, and her husband reached out to steady her.

  Grover’s grip on his rifle nearly slipped, and his heart began to beat so hard he felt it in his temples. He gaped down at that angular face and the wind-tousled auburn hair he’d never thought to see again in his life. Lawrence Wilder took the stairs of the bandstand quickly and embraced his father.

  Grover couldn’t pull his gaze from Lawrence. Every detail of the other man held him, from the supple, worn quality of his black boots and long army coat, to the string of medals decorating the chest of his blue uniform. He’d grown broader in the shoulder, but his face seemed hollowed and his smile appeared oddly fleeting. There was something slightly off about the motion of his right arm as well. He held it stiffly and moved it with deliberate care.

  Grover wondered if his skin still smelled like ponderosa pine or if that boyish hitch caught in his low laugh when he was drunk. Did he even remember Grover or their secret adventures into the woods?

  “Who’s that?” Toby pointed as if Grover might have missed the spectacle.

  “Mage Lawrence Wilder, the mayor’s son.” Grover hoped the boy didn’t notice how his voice caught on the name. “He went off to fight the Arrow War over in China eight years ago. He died in battle—” The anguish of that loss tore through Grover even now. Unlike Cora who publically mourned her fiancé’s demise, Grover had found solace only in the isolation of the wilderness. He still couldn’t ride past the apple trees of the Wilder House without feeling as if someone had pushed a knife into his chest. “Or that’s what was reported.”

  “But he’s alive.” Toby angled his spyglass down at Lawrence.

  “That does appear to be the case.” Eight years he’d been gone and six of those presumed dead. What in the blazes had happened?

  On the bandstand, Lawrence and the mayor broke apart and welcomed the other officials from the Office of Theurgy and Magicum. Briefly, while the mayor read from his speech, Lawrence seemed to search through the gathered crowd. Grover fought the urge to shout or wave like a mad man—that sort of scene wouldn’t do anybody any good, and that was assuming it was him Lawrence looked for.

  Eight years without a single letter wasn’t exactly an indication of fidelity.

  Toby toyed with his spyglass and heaved a particularly dramatic sigh.

  “You wanna go down and sing with Aunt Cora and Uncle George?”

  “Nah, I ain’t likely to recollect most the words.” Grover hardly pulled his gaze from Lawrence. His pulse still pounded so hard that he felt certain his voice would quaver like some old auntie if he tried to sing. “I’m going to keep watch up here a while longer. The dome ain’t quite healed up from where the airship burned through it.”

  Toby hesitated. But after Grover pointed out that Maria and Claudia Garcia were selling cochinito cookies one dozen for a nickel, Toby abandoned him right quick.

  Grover watched and listened to the formal welcome but in such a shaken state that he wasn’t certain he understood half of what was said. He couldn’t stop staring at Lawrence or wondering what had happened to him.

  The mutton-chop twins revealed themselves to be the brothers David and Nathaniel Tucker, both war veterans and professors of theurgy. While they grinned and offered assurances about advances in alchemic engines and expanding the fortification spells, the gray-haired woman, Lady Honora Astor, glowered at the crowd. When asked to offer a few words, she stated that justice would be had for all those thousands whose lives and homelands had been torn from them.

  Her words inspired resounding cheers from the crowd, but made Grover feel uneasy. Lady Astor’s ire reminded Grover of when he’d been six years old and Reverend Dodd had stormed into his family’s cabin, red-faced and accusing Grover of feeding his parishioners’ dairy cows locoweed and cursing their milk. Grover’s ma had looked terrified, but she’d stepped right between the reverend and Grover and hefted her snakewood broom like she meant to lay Reverend Dodd out with it. A moment later Grover’s pa had bounded in from the tanning shed with his fleshing knife still in his hand and sent the reverend running.

  Grover had felt both awed by and proud of his parents that afternoon.

  But a week later, Grover had woken, choking on smoke as his ma pulled him from his bed and flames climbed the walls of their cabin. He and his ma escaped, but his big, gentle pa had died fighting to save their home.

  Instinctively, Grover glanced to Mayor Wilder. He’d been the one who’d given Grover’s ma work at his mansion after the fire, and he’d seen to it that Reverend Dodd let them be. The mayor was a strong believer in abolition and also related by blood to too many genuine mages to confuse a little boy’s capering with any sort of real curse.

  Today the mayor beamed at his son and assured the officials that all the resources of Fort Arvada City would be at their disposal. Then Cora Cody and her friends in the Ladies’ Christian Charity Union sang a hymn. Grover could sense Cora fighting not to stare at Lawrence the entire time. Lawrence offered her a curt smile but he didn’t hold her gaze, nor did he sing along.

  At last the public welcome ended. The party of federal officials and the city’s most prominent citizens began dispersing to prepare for the private celebration to be held that evening at the mayor’s residence. Though just as Lawrence reached the steps of the ribbon-festooned bandstand, he raised his head, and Grover thought that he stared straight up at him. But Lawrence’s expression remained distant. He descended into the crowd flanked by ranks of blue-uniformed soldiers while all around excited throngs cheered and waved.

  Long rays of setting sunlight shot between the jagged peaks of the surrounding mountains. Up in the cliffs a pack of coyotes howled high and long against the wails of a flock of pterosaurs.

  Grover shifted in his saddle and tipped back his wide-brimmed hat.

  He hadn’t been down to the Wilder House in years, and in truth he had no right or reason to go now. If he possessed a drop of common sense, he’d turn around right now and ride back to his room in the Codys’ boarding house. Because what the blazes was he going to do when he got there? Hitch Betty to a post with a bunch of nervous horses and stroll on in through the front door like he’d mistaken himself for a man of high society rather than the son of their former cook?

  Beneath him, Betty ruffled her rust-speckled feathers and twisted her long neck back to cast him that eerie owl-like stare of hers. Grover reached out and stroked the warm blue skin between her huge amber eyes and her glossy bronze beak. In response she produced a sweet little chirp then picked up her pace, ca
rrying Grover down the road at a breath-taking clip.

  Betty was no more natural to this world than the hulking, toothy giants that stalked the mountains. Grover knew that. But he’d found Betty five years ago, still trapped in her egg at an abandoned nest, and something about her plaintive peeping had moved him. Maybe he’d just been too lonely out in the woods with no company but his memories of Lawrence—he didn’t know.

  Whatever the reason, he hadn’t left her to die. Instead he’d carefully pried the shell open and kept the little beast fed and warm all through that fall and winter.

  In spring when he brought her with him back into town, it had caused a stir. But Betty liked to show off, and that made it easy to demonstrate how well he’d trained her. Both Robert Haim and Will Blackhill had offered to buy her off of him. Grover declined as politely as he knew how and sold them the hides and feathers of other dinosaurs instead. To stable her, he’d handed over an extra pound of salt alongside the pelts and dried meat that he normally traded George Cody for his own room and board.

  Round the dinner table at the boarding house, George Cody reckoned Betty was some kind of early relation to an ostrich. (He was a firm believer in Mr. Darwin’s evolution theory.) He’d shown around several lithographs from his fine volumes of natural-science books. But comparing an ostrich to Betty was like comparing a canary to an eagle. She stood hip to hip with most horses, and instead of tiny wings, she possessed feathered arms, ending in three-taloned fingers—which she was not shy of slashing at any stallion that came after her feed. Claws like Bowie knives tipped each of her long toes, and her plumed tail rippled with so much muscle that she could lash even the meanest dog ten feet in the air.

  Though tonight, Grover hoped no one would be setting dogs on him and Betty.

  Ahead, the Wilder House loomed up over the other tidy wood-trimmed homes lining both sides of the packed dirt street. The three-story house sported wide steps, carved pillars, big windows and a steep, sweeping roof. The setting sun lit the touches of gold that adorned the oversized front door and glimmered from the star-shaped weather vane.