Three Slices Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Authors’ Notes

  Also by Kevin Hearne

  Also by Delilah S. Dawson

  Also by Chuck Wendig

  A Prelude to War

  Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys

  Interlude: Swallow

  Copyright Notice

  I can’t recall precisely where I heard that tyromancy was actually a thing, but methinks it was during the summer of 2012. As soon as I knew it existed I knew I had to write about it, the way some people have to climb mountains or crack safes once they see them. And if I could find another couple of authors brave enough to do it, maybe we could produce the world’s first tyromancy-themed anthology. So my quest began and now here is the spiffy MacGuffin: THREE SLICES, or rather three stories where somebody along the way predicts the future via the coagulation of cheese. I couldn’t be more thrilled to share this volume with Delilah S. Dawson and Chuck Wendig, authors whose work I admire and humans I am proud to call my friends.

  And I am super-mega-turbo-chuffed that Galen Dara agreed to illustrate this for us as well. All three of us are huge fans of her work and she makes us geek out.

  My novella, A Prelude to War, is a vital part of the Iron Druid Chronicles—fans of the series should consider it IDC 7.5. For that reason it might not be the ideal introduction to my work; if you like to read series in order then please begin with Hounded, book 1.

  Many thanks to my Metal Editor, Tricia Narwani, for her usual sterling insights, and to Richard Shealy for copy edits.

  Hope you enjoy!

  When Kevin Hearne says, “Hey, do you want to do an anthology?” you say YES. And when you find out it's about tyromancy, and that Chuck Wendig is also involved and that Galen Dara is doing the art, you know you made the right decision. That's my life philosophy: Always say yes to cheese.

  When I asked my readers what they'd most like in a short story, the unanimous answer was MORE CRIMINY, which is why this is my first Blud story from a man's perspective. But you don't need to have read the books to enjoy it, and I hope you'll consider it a welcoming introduction to the dark, dangerous, whimsical world of Sang, where tyromancy fits in perfectly.

  So thank you, Kevin and Chuck, for squishing my story between your words like the buttercream in a birthday cake. Thanks to Tricia and Shecky for embettering that story and for Galen to bringing together my favorite things in her illustration: vampire horses, blood, and dangerous chicks with lassoes. And thank you, dear reader, for joining us in this mad world of cheese and prognostication.

  It was only a matter of time before we played straight down the middle and decided to aim for the popular crowd and write a series of novellas based on tyromancy. All the cool kids are doing it. JK Rowling. Stephen King. Pat Rothfuss. We are nothing if not bandwagoneers, and we want a slice (get it? Slice?) of that sweet, sweet cheese-reader money.

  Which means, most of all, I need to thank you readers for reading this in the first place. Deciding to take a risk on yet another tyromancy cheese-story collection is kind of you. And I know we all appreciate it.

  Big ups too to my fellow anthology mates here—Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne are that rare combination of incredibly nice and incredibly talented, and so it is my distinct privilege to be here with them now.

  Also, thanks to Shecky for the copy-edits, Tricia for the big edits, and Galen Dara who remains one of my favorite artists working in SFF today.

  Novels

  Hounded

  Hexed

  Hammered

  Tricked

  Trapped

  Hunted

  Shattered

  And coming soon…

  Staked

  Novellas

  Grimoire of the Lamb

  Two Ravens and One Crow

  Short Stories

  “The Chapel Perilous”

  “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street”

  Two Tales of the Iron Druid Chronicles,

  Including “Kaibab Unbound” and “A Test of Mettle”

  Blud novels

  Wicked as They Come

  Wicked as She Wants

  Wicked After Midnight

  Wicked Ever After (2015)

  Blud novellas

  The Mysterious Madam Morpho

  The Peculiar Pets of Miss Pleasance

  The Damsel and the Daggerman

  Short stories

  “The Three Lives of Lydia” – Carniepunk anthology

  “Uncharming” – Unbound anthology (2015)

  “The Greenest Grass” - Violent Ends anthology (2015)

  YA novels

  Servants of the Storm

  Hit

  Strike (2016)

  As Lila Bowen

  Wake of Vultures (2015)

  Horde of Crows (2016)

  Novels

  Blackbirds

  Mockingbird

  The Cormorant

  Atlanta Burns

  Under the Empyrean Sky

  Blightborn

  Double Dead

  Unclean Spirits

  The Blue Blazes

  And coming soon...

  The Harvest

  Zer0es

  Thunderbird

  Star Wars: Aftermath

  Novellas

  The Forever Endeavor

  Non-Fiction

  The Kick-Ass Writer

  The events of this story take place a week to ten days after the events of Shattered, book 7 of the Iron Druid Chronicles

  THE LOWLAND marsh in the hours before dawn was perhaps a bit too quiet. The rasp of insects and the throaty warbles of amphibians, so raucous moments before, had fallen off into nervous titters, and it wasn’t because of my presence or because of Oberon’s. We weren’t the predators here. I crouched down next to my hound in the tall grass and put a hand on the back of his neck. Not wanting to alert whoever might be listening with my speech, I spoke to him through the mental bond we shared.

  Quietly now. We are being stalked.

 

  I imagine we’ll find out soon enough when it jumps on us.

 

  My plan was not to be prey at any point, but things with teeth and an appetite usually get to decide what’s for dinner.

 

  That would be cheating.

  Oberon’s head began to swivel back and forth, searching for anything approaching through the reedy grasses that grew waist-high around puddles of standing water.

  We need to get our senses back into shape, Oberon, and here nature has provided us an opportunity to test ourselves. Nothing better for your hearing than being prey instead of predator for a while.

 

  I told you already. We have to see somebody here and this is where she lives.

  We were in Ethiopia, the far western portion of it bordering Sudan, in a wilderness now known as Gambela National Park. Most of it was grassland and low-lying wetlands like this, but the occasional tree-covered ridge would rise up as a pro-forma nod to topography and varied ecology. Lots of African buffalo and large antelope species like hartebeests and kob grazed in the area. Prides of lions and other big cats ran around grazing on them, and vultures grazed on the leftovers.

  if she wakes up at dawn and sees in her magic runes or whatever that she’s going to tell our fortune today except that we get eaten before we get there so that means her schedule is free and then her runes don’t know what to say except “Hey, how about those Broncos?”>

  What? Oberon, that is the most bizarre hypothetical ever. She doesn’t even use runes.

 

  The answer is divination doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t tell you that a certain future got canceled and it doesn’t make small talk. If it reveals anything, it reveals the most likely of futures, and that’s always up to interpretation. Even if you get the interpretation right, it can still change due to circumstances. You remember what Master Yoda said about the future?

 

  That’s right. Come on, let’s keep moving, but keep an eye out and your nose in the wind.

 

  Tell you what. If you see them, I’ll let you join in.

 

  We crept as best as we could through the marsh; my feet would occasionally make squidgy noises in the sucking mud, and without the covering drone of the local fauna, it sounded abnormally loud. I was grateful that we had a blanket of darkness to disguise us.

  I had cast night vision on us both so that we could see well, and we were alert for any noise above the swish of our own passage. Something else was alert to us.

  Hey, Oberon. I’ll bet you a sausage it’s a cheetah.

 

  I swear I don’t. I’m not cheating. You will probably figure it out before I do just based on what you smell.

 

  That was all the warning I got before a vampire leapt at me out of the grass from the left, arms outstretched, and tackled me into the mire. I threw up a forearm to prevent access to my throat but couldn’t manage anything else, as my sword arm was trapped beneath me. I got fangs in my arm and long, sharp nails digging into my shoulders.

 

  Stay back, Oberon! A vampire would kill him without a thought and I didn’t want to give him the chance, especially when I might be able to kill the vampire with nothing more than a thought. Since vampires weren’t living creatures, Gaia let us unbind them to their component parts. The trick to it was staying alive long enough to speak the unbinding. I’d almost died that way at the hands and fangs of a vampire almost as old as I was. Since then, I’d been working on a charm like the others around my neck that would execute a binding via mental command. The problem was, I had so few vampires to practice on to perfect it.

  Granuaile, my partner, asked me why I couldn’t simply practice on dead bodies, since that’s essentially what vampires were.

  “They’re a bit more than that, though,” I replied. “A mere dead body doesn’t walk around and consume blood. Vampires have magic to them that gives their bodies animation and strength, and that gray aura with the two red power centers in the head and heart. You have to unbind that as well as the raw matter of the body. That’s in the Old Irish words of the spell, remember—it attacks their magic first and then their bodies so that the magic cannot rebind to them. So, I need real vampires to practice on if I want to make this work.”

  On my single previous attempt, I’d caused the targeted vampire to experience something akin to mild digestive discomfort. He looked surprised but not especially pained. That had been encouraging, though—the targeting was working, at least, and having some effect. I’d adjusted the binding and craftsmanship of the charm since then and hoped it would work now. I triggered it as the vampire withdrew his fangs from my arm and dove again for my throat. The spell hit him like a punch to the solar plexus.

  He coughed blood and convulsed, his eyes squeezing shut for a second and then opening wide in surprise. He clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack, and I was able to push him off and roll away, muttering the words to the unbinding. The vampire recovered quickly and got up in time to launch himself at me once more, but now I had my guard up and I wasn’t going down again. I sidestepped his charge and finished the unbinding, after which he came apart with a splash inside his clothes and his head exploded into a mist of blood and bone dust.

 

  A better question would be “What’s a vampire doing out here?” Or maybe how I’d get clean anytime soon. I was covered in mud, which tended to happen when you rolled around in it, and I had some wounds that needed healing; I tripped my healing charm and let Gaia get to work on me.

 

  Yeah, thanks, I’m all right. His bite will heal up quickly. But we’d better move a bit faster ourselves. I’m worried about Mekera now.

  And my charm wasn’t quite there yet. It had clearly impacted the power center around the vampire’s heart but hadn’t destroyed it, and nothing happened to his head until I completed the full unbinding verbally. I would just have to keep working on it. Changing a structured verbal unbinding to a mental one in close proximity to the cold iron of my amulet was so tricky that it usually took me years to perfect a charm.

  Keep your nose open for more vampires, I told Oberon, but let’s pick up the pace a little.

  My hound easily lengthened his stride to match mine and we emerged from the marsh into a slightly dryer grassland that would, at a higher elevation, turn into a shrubby savanna. It had been so long since I’d been to this part of the world that there were few tethered trees nearby, and the Fae rangers had apparently ignored their duties here to some extent, necessitating a long run to our destination.

  Mekera lived off the grid by choice. She’d tried modern conveniences and said, “Yep, that’s convenient,” but pointed out that all electricity did was keep her in cities around lots of other people, and she liked her people in very small doses. After World War II and the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, she didn’t even want a small dose—I think something happened to her during that time, and I missed it since I’d been busy in the French Pyrenees helping people escape the Third Reich. She wouldn’t talk about it when I came to visit her, either. I got the sense from her glare that she couldn’t believe that the world had come to ask one more thing of her. But since I was one of the few people who could grant a particular wish of hers, she offered me a deal: Set her up someplace where she could do the hermit thing right for a while, and she’d practice her art on my behalf, predicting the safest places in the world to hide from Aenghus Óg in the coming decades. A lone rocky outcropping in the middle of the savanna, a sort of rebel hill that looked down on herds of ruminants, practically begged to be a secret lair. And so, with the help of the local elemental, I created one for her, carving an entrance out of the rock that would be invisible from the air and provide her with a shaded front porch. Everything else was underground, cool and sealed with nonporous stone so that she didn’t get flooded during the rainy season. She had a well of clear, clean water, the bottom level of her hideaway was cold enough to keep her perishables safe, and she did quite well for herself.

  In the nineties, before I moved to Tempe and adopted Oberon, she gave in to modernity and sent me a letter in San Diego—a feat in itself, since I had only been there a couple weeks and told no one where I was—asking me to upgrade her place with electricity. She wanted a stove and some other modern accouterments and needed windmills to make it happen. It was a challenging project to create a functional
kitchen and laboratory for her, but thoroughly enjoyable. Especially since my reward for this work was a precise divination on where to find my best friend. I had spent too long without an animal companion and felt it was time to do things right with a hound. Without a friend to trust you could sour on modern life, sour on the world, and withdraw from it like Mekera had.

  “There is an Irish wolfhound rescue ranch in Massachusetts,” she told me back then, when the United States was consumed with its president’s infidelities. “And if you arrive there on this precise date, you will catch him immediately after he arrives.”

  That last part was important because rescue ranches always spay and neuter the animals they take in. I caught Oberon before his trip to the vet, and Granuaile similarly caught Orlaith before she could be spayed. The two of them would have puppies someday and I was looking forward to it.

  I’d never told Oberon how I’d come to find him there or what fate awaited him had I been a day or two later. I figured he would have nightmares about it.

  Even though it was early morning and the sky was still gray with only the barest hint of sunrise, Mekera was sitting outside in a sling chair when we arrived on her front stoop, our chests heaving from a pleasant run unaided by the earth.

  “Hello, Mekera.”

  There was no welcome for an old acquaintance in her expression, and her voice was sullen. “Huh. Thought you’d be along sooner rather than later. Maybe not covered in mud, but still: good timing. The coffee’s almost ready. And there’s cheese and injera if you’re hungry,” she said, referring to a sourdough flatbread popular in Ethiopia. She rose from her chair, dressed in a long white linen tunic that split at the sides past her hips, with a two-inch-wide band of green and gold embroidery around the neck that met in the middle, fell in a single strip down to her knees, and then exploded into an Abyssinian cross design. It was a style of clothing favored by Habesha people, who were among the world’s first converts to Christianity long ago. Mekera had at one time been a debtera in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, though I think she gave that up at the beginning of the twentieth century. She kept her hair natural and maintained the appearance of a woman in her forties. She had something like khakis tucked into worn and scuffed calf-high, dark brown boots that she wore as low-grade armor against snakebites. She paused with her hand on the door handle and glanced back at Oberon. “Big dog. That the one I told you about last time I saw you?”