The Queen of Faith Read online

  THE COURT OF LIES

  PART ONE:

  THE QUEEN OF FAITH

  Mark Teppo

  FAIRWOOD PRESS

  Bonney Lake, WA

  THE QUEEN OF FAITH

  A Fairwood Press e-book

  July 2013

  Copyright © 2013 by Mark Teppo

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Fairwood Press

  21528 104th Street Court East

  Bonney Lake, WA 98391

  www.fairwoodpress.com

  Cover illustration and design by Neal Von Flue

  First Fairwood Press Edition: July 2013

  Printed in the United States of America

  “How The Mermaid Lost Her Song” first appeared at Strange Horizons, 2007. [www.strangehorizons.com]

  “The Transformation of Nickolas Caspian” first appeared in a Misfit Library anthology, 2005.

  “Chance Island” first appeared in a Misfit Library anthology, 2004.

  “The Nihil Nation Manifesto” first appeared at Mung Being, 2005. [www.mungbeing.com]

  “Mallory's Quick-Quick Seduction Cookies” first appeared in Scattered, Covered, Smothered (Two Crane Press), 2004

  “The Queen of Faith” first appeared at Farrago’s Wainscot with the title “Faith, Hidden in the Hands of the Blind,” 2008. [www.farragoswainscot.com]

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-200-6

  Electronic Edition by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  The Queen of Faith is the opening act of Mark Teppo's first collection, The Court of Lies. These six stories dive deep into childhood fairy tales, swap spit with Lovecraftian monstrosities, rail against the world from atop a burning soapbox, offer a means to influence people and make friends via a plate of cookies, and warn of the danger that lies in inviting dreamers to sit at your table. These are stories of liars, heartbreakers, and fabulists; the way they see the world is undoubtedly the way it truly is.

  At least one sentence of the previous paragraph is true. Welcome to the Court of Lies. The Queen suggests you place your trust in her . . .

  HOW THE MERMAID LOST HER SONG

  When the medical examiner opened the corpse's chest, he found the body cavity filled with sea water. Two small sea turtles, their shells still soft like the fingernails of a baby, were floating in the briny solution. The lungs were stuffed with starfish, and a squid, colored a sickly maroon, was wrapped around the heart.

  The squid refused to let go of the man's organ, and the medical examiner finally gave up trying to separate the two. He dumped them both in a bucket of salt water, thereby ensuring the pickling of the heart.

  “It's just a drowning,” the Chief Constable said when the medical examiner called. “We found him on the beach. He must have been in the water long enough for the sea life to invade his body.”

  The medical examiner tried to point out that it was more likely the man had died of asphyxiation, choked to death by the cluster of starfish in his lungs. But the Chief Constable had already hung up.

  The medical examiner sighed and thumbed the switch on his phone several times. When the operator came on the line, he asked to be connected to Scotland Yard in London.

  The squid released the heart, gently depositing the organ on the bottom of the bucket. Flickering through a kaleidoscope of colors, it began to swim counter-clockwise. Maroon streaking into blue dissolving into black turning yellow roasting into green.

  “Yes? Hello?” The connection with the Yard was filled with crackling static. “This is Dr. Garrow in Suffolk County. I have a most unusual situation up here.” He glanced down at the squid in the bucket. “No, someone a little more specialized, if possible.”

  Detective Inspector Phreniwit tapped the glass of the fish tank with the polished handle of his cane. A sea turtle paddled towards the sound. Its knobby nose bumped against the glass.

  “Chelonia mydas,” the medical examiner supplied. He stood by the narrow window of his office, smoking his fourth cigarette of the day. “Green sea turtles. They grow to be about two hundred kilograms. The two I pulled out of the body are about three days old.” His voice quivered on the last words. “Which happens to also be my best estimate on how long he's been dead.”

  Phreniwit counted the starfish, arms overlapping, strewn across the bottom of the tank like scattered orange rinds. “Seven,” he mused. “Why are there only seven?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Seven is an odd number. Yet you say that you removed these starfish from the body's lungs—there are two of them. Why wouldn't there be eight or six starfish? Why seven? It implies irregularity.”

  The medical examiner blew smoke from his nose. “There's nothing regular about this entire situation.” His hand shaking, he pointed at the other tank with his cigarette. “I had to remove his heart in order to get the squid out.”

  Phreniwit tapped on the smaller tank with his cane. The white squid flexed orange and then blossomed into streaks of gold and purple. “Fascinating,” he murmured, staring into the squid's blank gaze. “Protector or devourer? I wonder.” The squid shifted color again, draining to opaque white as if to give nothing away to the detective's question. “Have you identified the body?”

  “Not yet. I've asked Missing Persons and they've got nothing that matches. Other than water damage, the body was in good shape, so he wasn't homeless.”

  “Just not yet missed.”

  The medical examiner shrugged. “Or he's a tourist. Not American. Dental work isn't nearly obsessive enough. Probably British.”

  “Probably?”

  “Dental records are going to be tricky. Whatever work he had—and this is just a guess, mind you, but it looks like a couple of crowns—has been torn out.”

  “Removed?”

  Dr. Garrow swallowed. “Torn out. With a hooked implement of some kind. Near as I can tell.”

  Phreniwit tapped the glass as he thought. “A hook. Or a fork. Or even something larger.” The hovering squid showed no interest in his coded message of clicks and taps. “Yes,” the detective decided. “I know what you are.” He straightened up, leaning heavily on his cane. “I'd like to see where the body was found,” he said to the medical examiner. “Can you have someone take me there?”

  Phreniwit found the young woman a kilometer up the beach from the destitute shore where the body had been discovered. She sat at the peak of a jumbled mass of cracked rock, wrapped in a sea-stained yellow blanket. Her hair was damp from the spray, and her skin was waxy and pale from exposure to the cold wind blowing off the turbulent ocean.

  Climbing like an old three-legged goat, he clambered up to her and sat down on a nearby extrusion of wet stone. The water soaked through his wool trousers immediately, chilling his buttocks, and he shifted uncomfortably on the stone.

  She watched him as he filled his pipe. The blanket was taut about her shoulders, tucked under her legs. A blotch, like a mixture of pomegranate and blueberries, stained the hollow of her right eye, dripping down across her cheek. Her feet were bare and her hands were clasped tightly in her lap. She didn't speak the entire time he filled, tamped, lit, and stoked his pipe.

  “It's beautiful, isn't it?” he said after a minute of reflective smoking. “The way the sea moves, undulating and recirculating against the shore. I wonder sometimes what we lost when we decided to give up our flippers and grow feet. What did we give up by climbing onto land? Why did we bother? So much of the world is water; why did we give all that up to walk on land?”

  The young woman shivered, but sa
id nothing.

  “We were fish then, and I doubt our brains were developed enough to actually think, in the true Cartesian sense, of course. We were just acting on instinct, thrusting ourselves out of the water and onto dry land. How difficult those first years must have been: learning how to walk, learning how to breathe, learning how to eat the desiccated food grown in the dead earth. How different that all must have been from being submerged in water.” He raised his pipe from his lips. “No tobacco, for instance. Nor fire, for that matter. Imagine: a world where we never needed fire. Is that why we did it? Or was it a different sort of ardor that brought us onto land?”

  A tear started in the corner of the young woman's eye, a shining reflection of the ocean caught in her eyelashes.

  “I think we crawled from the sea because we wanted to touch Heaven. We learned how to breathe air and stand upright because the sky was so far from the water. How else were we going to reach it?” He sucked on his pipe, blew a stream of white smoke into the air and watched it be torn apart by the wind off the water. “When we gave up scales and gills, we left other aspects of ourselves behind as well—empathy and kindness, possibly. Maybe that is why we forgot to grow wings. Why we forgot so many things.”

  Phreniwit looked at the young woman. “This wasn't the first time he hit you, was it?”

  She shook her head, and the tear tracked down the bruise on her face.

  He sighed and looked at the water for a long time, watching the foamy spume dash against the rocks. The breakers growled as they crashed against the shore. “You can't return,” he said. “No matter the tribute you send to be gathered by the fork of your stormy father. He and your undine mother love you very much, but they can't change you back to what you were.”

  Beyond the cresting waves, moving in the swell of the approaching ocean, light glinted off jeweled scales. Hidden in the hollows of the ocean's roar, he heard the distant sound of her mermaid sisters singing, each to each.

  “I do have some influence with the local constabulary,” Phreniwit said, staring at the light dancing on the sea. “There is an institute up north by Derbyshire that is close to the sea. I hear the rooms are perpetually damp. I will convince the magistrate that such a place is well suited to your situation.”

  He felt her hand on his shoulder, and when he placed his fingers over hers, he found her to be warm. Not cold at all.

  THE TRANSFORMATION OF NICKOLAS CASPIAN

  After all the paintings sold in the first five days of the show, I thought the quick sell-through would make the dreams stop but the nightmares got worse as if the malignant ember in my brain was emboldened by my success. “Yes, yes,” I could hear it whisper during the night. “This is the way.”

  Which way: Insanity? Suicide?

  The voice was never forthcoming with an answer; it continued to stalk me when I slept. I countered by not closing my eyes, by capitalizing on my newfound celebrity. I haunted the party circuit, emblazoned with the seal of approval from both local newspapers (even the mercurial alternative paper confessed—grudgingly—a fascination with my work). I was welcome everywhere, and everywhere offered me alcohol and drugs and groupies from the Cornish College of Arts to keep sleep at bay.

  Two weeks after my successful run at the Hole in the Wall gallery, Horace Wall found me on the terrace of a fortieth floor Belltown penthouse. I was staring at the tiny lights of the ferries as they crossed the infinite blackness of the Puget Sound, trying to remember the name of the woman whose breasts I had just been staring at while pretending to participate in the conversation. “You don't look good, Nickolas,” Horace said by way of greeting. “I hear you've been partying.”

  I tried for a smile, failed, and settled for leaning against the thick wall of the terrace. The breeze off the bay smelled faintly like rain and the evergreen forests of the Olympic peninsula. “Celebrating,” I slurred.

  Horace looked at me closely and I squirmed under his gaze, moving my hands feebly as if, like some arcane prestidigitator, my fingers could weave a spell of banishment. “You should take a break from the celebrating,” he said. “You need to get some sleep.”

  “No sleep,” I countered, the threat of a nocturnal visitation putting ice in my spine. “No fucking way.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “Why do the brilliant ones always have to be crazy?” He put his hand on my arm, squeezing tightly enough to capture my attention. His hair was neatly slicked along his skull, making his face look like the rounded front of a peach. “This probably isn't the right time,” he said. “I want you to meet someone.”

  We weren't alone on the terrace. The other man was a well-dressed stick of a fellow whose seams and cuffs were financed by old money. He was pale like he summered here and wintered farther north, and his eyes were sharp and restless like chips of glass lit by flickering candlelight. “Nickolas, this is Dalton Hentlock.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Caspian.” There was an undercurrent to his voice, a serpentine sibilance that, if I had been sober, would have raised goose-bumps along my arm. As it was, I felt vaguely nauseous like there was an excess of pressure against my eardrums. “Enjoying the party?”

  “Trying,” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth like it was covered with a fine layer of fur.

  “I want to offer you a commission,” Dalton said, the words reverberating in my head. Horace's hand was still on my arm, holding me steady as my knees wobbled with liquid uncertainty. “I want you to paint something for me.”

  The white object in his hand slowly penetrated the fog in my head: a folded piece of paper that seemed like the only real thing in that moment of fading unreality. I reached for the page, my fingers closing aimlessly on its fine surface. He came to my assistance, unfolding the piece of paper and holding it up to my face.

  The cancer in my brain spilled its darkness across the base of my skull. The fog of intoxication and drug euphoria I had been carefully cultivating broke, dispersing like rising smoke. I took the paper from Dalton's hand, my grip tight around the single page.

  “Do you think you could paint that?” he asked, his tight smile showing the rhetorical nature of his question.

  *

  I hadn't bothered to title any of the pictures in the gallery show. “The Naturalist's Nightmare” was Horace's idea. The pictures were, he attested on the press release and to any journalist who bothered to ask, portraits of foreign physiology, alien shapes rendered and captured through the filter of the nineteenth century's understanding of anatomy. They were snapshots of evolution in action, the future shoved into the meat sack of the present.

  The subjects of the portraits came to me when I slept. Most artists dream their work—they have lucid moments where the work is realized in their heads—and their method of artistic expression is a matter of getting the immaterial out of their brain and into the material world. Some build artifices of wire and metal, some find their mental images in the natural world and take pictures, others work in soft clay, some express their dreams through notes and sounds, and others use the hammer and chisel to reveal the hidden creatures within marble. Me? I paint. Oils, mainly, and I've done a few watercolors in my time but, for the most part, I work with a handful of paint trowels.

  My work is heavy; even the smaller canvases weigh more than ten pounds. I use a lot of paint. Some say that I don't paint so much as carve through the layers of colored strata that I've thrown up on a canvas, a sort of topological geographer: the Hand of God moving and arranging the landscape to create the mountains and valleys of the world. I did abstracts for awhile, landscapes of suffused light and radial motion like a heavy-handed version of Turner, went through my portrait phase (though I never managed to reach the plateau that Goya did with the stark terror that he managed to infuse into all of his painted subjects), took a left turn along a poorly kept path started by Pollack, and ended up somewhere within splatter distance of Moreau's Symbolism and the late twentieth century comic book impressionism of Bill Sienkiewicz and Ashley Wood.

&
nbsp; Or so the critics have been saying.

  Like I said, I paint what comes into my head and lately I don't think the dreams have been entirely mine.

  The images felt like modern-industrial Gothic, shot through with the bleak nocturnal despair of Romanticism, as if William Blake was reincarnated as the lovechild of HR Giger and Floria Sigismondi. There was always alien architecture in the background, half-realized monoliths of twisted geometries with windows that looked like ragged mouths and doors that opened onto abattoirs and charnel pits. The subjects of these pictures invariably had too many bones as if I couldn't quite decide what sort of mammal skeleton I wanted to drape a human skin across. They lay on their sides or hunkered down on their misshapen feet, staring out of the canvas with blank eyes. Their lost faces stared accusingly at the audience with pained expressions as if by looking at them—by painting them—I had made them the way they were.

  Maybe it was the symbols inscribed on their skin. Maybe they could read the letters I drew on their flesh, the words running up their arms and down their legs, the phrases imprinted across their shoulders and hidden on their backs. Maybe they knew how I named them with these words and they hated me all the more.

  I didn't understand the script. It was as alien as their shapes and the landscapes. I thought it was just as much a project of my fevered imagination as the rest.

  Until Dalton Hentlock handed me a photocopy of a drawing covered with those same arcane symbols.

  *

  It took five days for my hands to stop shaking, the persistent remnants of my debauchery slow to relinquish hold on my nerve endings. I spent those days as a guest at Hentlock's mansion in Montlake. In the morning, I sat on the veranda, shivering in the brisk morning air as I drank cups of black coffee and watched the continual stream of traffic across the floating bridge on Lake Washington; during the afternoon and evening as my brain cleared, I stayed in the library on the second floor, working on preliminary sketches for the portal.