Labyrinth Inhabitant's Last Issue

Issue 11 will be the last. See my introduction to the issue. To anyone thinking of starting an e-zine, I'd strongly endorse my approach of choosing a weirdly narrow theme. You don't get overwhelmed with submissions, but the self-selected group of authors who do submit are more likely to send you high-quality work. I think the site's relatively high acceptance rate belied the fact that, as an editor, I was always able to be every bit as selective as I wanted to be.

Running the site was a good experience, but over three years is a long time to stick to any creative project, especially one that was never designed to make any money. So, I decided to leave it at a high point. As you'll see if you click through to the issue, the works in Issue 11 were possibly the best yet.

P.S. I'm pretty sure every submission got a response. If your story didn't get one, I guess this means I rejected it?

Issue 11 at the halfway point

Because I haven't been accepting a lot of submissions lately, Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 11 is behind schedule and it'll cover six months rather than the usual three. However, all submissions are still receiving responses within one month. Alexandra Seidel's poem Twists, Turns; Lost Things has just been posted.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 10

Issue 10 began (if you read from top to bottom) or ended (if you read from earliest to latest) with the essay Entrapism. For this issue I received 24 submissions, and I accepted three stories (one of which was flash length) as well as one poem.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 9

I've decided to clear out the blogspam and go back to using this page for slush updates.

The introduction for issue 9 was A Labyrinth In Retrospect. For this issue I accepted 5 stories and poems out of 30 submissions. A standout work was the English translation of Death in This Garden Like a Pilot in His Ship, by Jacques Barbéri (tr. Michael Shreve).

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 8

And another issue is up! In this double issue covering the last half of 2009, we have the stories My Own Private Earth, by Lawrence R. Dagstine, Fear In the Land Without Shadows, by Christopher Schmitz, Experimental Archaeology, by Bogi Takács, and Teen Success, by Jason Corner, plus the poem Infrasubstructure, by Diane Boisvert and my review of The Maze Runner. There's also another poem posted, Marginalia to Stone Bird, by Rose Lemberg, but through the alchemy of Labyrinth Inhabitant that one is considered to be part of issue 9 instead of issue 8.

The 5 accepted works for issue eight were selected out of the 34 (by a rough count) submissions during the latter half of the year. I got a lot of poems this time around. Although I do seem to accept at least one poem every issue, I think stories will always play the more central role in Labyrinth Inhabitant. It's really hard to work your way into the "mysterious artificial environment" theme in the space of a poem, especially because it typically requires building up an actual mystery. There aren't many poems in the mystery genre, that I know of. I also accept maze-structured poems that aren't set in an actual labyrinth, but those are kind of a sideshow to the main theme of the site. (But still, isn't "Marginalia to Stone Bird" amazing?)

Hey, Hey, 50K

I once swore never to post an apology for not blogging, so I'll just point out the fact that the time I spent vouchsafing a spectacular victory in NaNoWriMo has detracted from the time I've spent on LabInhab.

So, if your submission has been languishing without a response, it should get one fairly soon, and now would be a good time to submit. My plan is to complete Issue 8 by the end of December.

Note on submissions

I've just cleared out the Labyrinth Inhabitant submission pile, and I've only accepted one story for the new issue, though there were several very near misses. As I discussed in the last update, I was already considering letting the new issue run through the end of the year, so that's now pretty much a certainty. It doesn't mean I'm ignoring the site.

If anybody has a submission still pending as of October 4 (today) with no response from me, please send me a query email.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 7

The new issue is up. Labyrinth Inhabitant is now upgraded to WordPress, and it now has the kind of hosting you pay money for.

Out of 24 submissions this time around, I accepted one story, one piece of flash fiction, and one poem (plus I ran one story I accepted last quarter, leaving me with none in reserve).

I'm slipping a little behind my intended quarterly schedule. If submissions are slow for issue 8, I might let it run through the end of the year and call it the Winter 2010 issue. Even if I do that, it shouldn't have much impact on anyone who wants to submit, because I'm still generally maintaining my one-month-at-the-most response time and posting most stories soon after I accept them. So check the submissions page and send me more stories!

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 6

The new issue is online. My essay this time around is my long-awaited review of Minotaur China Shop.

This time around I accepted 4 stories and 1 poem out of 17 submissions, which means I now have one story already stockpiled for next issue. These numbers would seem to indicate that I'm not being very selective, but I thought the submissions were strong this time around, including several very near misses.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 5

is now available for your enjoyment.

My introductory essay this time was so immense that I won't even repost it here, but it's a very important document: the Preliminary Report of the Late-Career Genre Author Human Rights Investigatory Commission.

And here are the selectivity stats: out of 16 unsolicited submissions that I would have considered only for this issue, I accepted 2 stories. There was a poem I probably should have accepted, but I was being too snooty so I turned it down. Plus, I solicited and accepted one other story.

The most common reason for rejecting submissions, as always, was that they did not take place in a mysterious artificial environment. However, violations of the "no blank or featureless settings" rule made a strong showing this quarter. I have a feeling that, as the archives grow and people get a better sense of what I'm looking for, "featureless setting" could conceivably become the most common rejection criterion.

These are exciting times!

Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 4

It's up! And here's the part of it I wrote:

Let me quote a dialogue from Neal Stephenson’s recent novel Anathem:

MENTOR: “[The] whole point of living in a cloistered math is to reduce our causal linkages with the extramuros world to the minimum, isn’t it?”

STUDENT: “Socially, yes. Culturally, yes. Ecologically, even. But we use the same atmosphere, we hear their mobes driving by—on a pure theoric level, there is no causal separation at all!”

MENTOR: “If there were another universe, altogether separate from ours—no causal linkages whatsoever between Universes A and B—would time flow at the same rate between them?”


(In Anathem, a “math” is a sort of monastic order for mathematicians and scientists who shut themselves off from the outside or “extramuros” world for one, ten, one hundred or one thousand years. “Mobes” are cars, except awesomer.)

The question the wise old mentor raises in this passage is central to the labyrinth inhabitant subgenre: If humans create such a self-sufficient environment for themselves that it effectively becomes a world unto itself, is there any meaningful connection between events inside the artificial environment and events in the outside world? The mentor speculates that there may have been a secret math whose inhabitants cut themselves off for ten thousand years, and who separated themselves from the outside world so effectively that they created a separate causal domain unknowable to people in the rest of the world, like the inside of that box that contained Schrödinger’s cat. In a phenomenon called “Causal Domain Shear,” their timeline ended up drifting so far afield from the timeline everyone else inhabited that when they finished their ten-thousand year mission and came out their front gate, only some three thousand years had passed in the outside world.

Anathem spends hundreds of pages showing how artificial environments enable the development of unique cultures despite the abjectly postmodern global monoculture outside the maths’ gates (the cloisters themselves aren’t in the form of labyrinths, but when the inhabitants choose to promote themselves to a math that will be cut off for a longer period, they do so by traversing a labyrinth to reach the more isolated area where their new order lives). But Anathem isn’t just a labyrinth inhabitant novel; it’s a meta-labyrinth inhabitant novel. Events force members of the maths to come out of their cloisters so they can influence one another and be influenced, and they tangle with enemies who live in an artificial environment of a different sort and who have a habit of spinning off new causal domains right and left. In fact, the discovery of the different ways that causal domains can influence one another is arguably the central intellectual adventure of the book. It’s a question that quickly runs into some thorny issues of quantum physics and philosophy. I couldn’t do justice to Anathem by trying to summarize Stephenson's ideas any further, but I recommend it as a thought-provoking book and a good example of why there deserves to be a whole subgenre of stories about people who live in giant artificial environments of mystery.

But do the stories in this fourth issue of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine happen to address the very same theme? Why, yes, it seems that they do!

The prison cell in Terence Kuch’s “Simon Says” is a perfect example of an isolated causal domain. The prisoner seems to have some residual knowledge of what the outside world is like, but ever since he got imprisoned by some totalitarian overlord his access to new information has been strictly curtailed. And, of course, the assumption that there is a totalitarian overlord is part of the problem. In the prisoner's mind, the system that keeps him in captivity is personified as a single Keeper doling out the same rations and stimuli every day and every year. But in the outside world, it’s just as likely that the prisoner has a succession of jailers working from the same set of directions, or perhaps an automated feeding device programmed by the now-dead Keeper long ago. Maybe the Keeper is so far out of the prisoner’s causal domain that he’s in an indeterminate state between all of these possibilities. At least, until the day when the prisoner gets out of his cell and learns that his causal relationship with the outside world is even stranger than it seems.

That’s right, “Simon Says” isn’t one of those prisoner stories where the hero is trapped in a cell and he thinks some thoughts and then the author gives you the “artistic” ending leaving it up in the air what, if anything, will ever happen. In “Simon Says” the prisoner is in the cell, and then he is outside the cell, and then something further happens. Here at Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine we get things done.

In Therese Arkenberg’s “The Wall,” I’m pretty sure the heroine’s causal domain includes the entire planet except for a dead zone right in the center of the city where she lives. It’s as if humankind fanned out and started exploring the planet at the exact antipodes of her city, and now the normal rules of reality apply everywhere except that one spot they don’t quite have a handle on. My theory is that the city is essentially a donut-shaped labyrinth. What I’m trying to say is that if somebody who lived in the city was to sneak into that mysterious area in the center—I’m not saying somebody will sneak in, I’m just saying if somebody was to sneak in—some crazy shit would probably happen to that person.

And in Lindsey Duncan’s “Ten Cities Down,” the causal domains are arranged in a hierarchy one on top of the other like the levels of the Inferno, and there are strict immigration controls between them. The privileged people who live below are free to travel to higher levels, but travel in the opposite direction is prohibited. As a result, people from the lower levels are free to influence whoever they want in the higher levels, but they can prevent the Hylaean flow from running in the opposite direction (I can’t explain it; read Anathem). But the normal order of things turns upside down when one man returns from the dead in the lowest city, and the authorities must keep him from escaping to the surface.

Thanks to this issue’s authors, and thanks to all of the approximately 100 authors who submitted to Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine during its first year!

"The Organist of Congress Avenue"

My story "The Organist of Congress Avenue" appears in the (slightly late to press, I guess) July/August 2008 issue of the Victorian speculative fiction magazine The Willows. The Willows in only published in media that would have been speculated about by Victorians, i.e. paper, and its full list of stories doesn't appear online, and so my claim to have been published therein is both totally plausible and inconvenient to verify!

As for issue four of Labyrinth Inhabitant, one story is posted and another has been bought, so I'm still looking for at least one more. I'd like to wrap the issue up by mid-October. Don't bother sending in any reviews of Anathem or Minotaur China Shop--I'll handle those.

LabInhab Issue 3 Slush Report

Issue 3 is up. Issue 3 is the most terrifying issue. This is the first issue since the pay rates for stories have gone up to $20-$40, and the quality of submissions has improved. I've been getting strong submissions from the beginning, but I'm no longer getting very many awful submissions. In particular, there are fewer submissions completely from out of left field; most people now seem to read the guidelines first.

There were a couple of nonfiction subs, but I didn't feel they'd fit. An accepted article would have to be something unique, with original research or at least original observations. What I got were more like general facts about labyrinths (not plagiarized though, as far as I could tell! I googled!).

Overall, the four accepted works were culled from a total of 22 submissions. Those aren't such bad odds for a writer, so keep submitting!

LabInhab Issue 2: The Library in the Labyrinth

All right! The internet came through for me again with three more terrific labyrinth stories, and once again they arguably share at least one other theme: Libraries in the Labyrinth. Combining these two great flavors probably seems like a natural idea, since LabInhab patron saint Jorge Luis Borges wrote about them both, often at the same time. So what do these two themes have to do with one another?

When I think of characters trapped in the labyrinth of a library, the first one to come to mind isn’t from Borges. It’s the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the old, dusty love interest from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who the heroine mistakes for the next Milton. His thing is that he wants to compose a “Key to All Mythologies,” a book to prove Jesus equals Osiris equals Vishnu etc., unifying all human spirituality into one big scheme with Christianity at the center and basically proving the existence of God. Naturally, Casaubon buries himself up to his eyebrows in what amounts to a pile of cross-referenced index cards, and dies of old age with his great work hardly begun. Neil James Hudson brings us a similar character with his Curator in The History Eaters, who stores the entire records of the history of Earth on a space station that was once as well-organized as the Dewey Decimal System, but is now breaking down into unshapely miscellany.

It’s one of those universal stories, you see. A well-meaning wannabe polymath tries to lay out all the world’s data in some kind of universal monument to human knowledge, but he inevitably ends up wandering lost in his creation until he dies. There’s just too much knowledge to get a handle on in one lifetime (since I’ve got cross-references on the brain anyway, see also Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and its librarian “Jorge of Burgos”).

But maybe by harnessing the work of hundreds of researchers, rather than working alone, it would be possible to achieve total knowledge? That’s the approach of the sorcerer in Daniel Ausema’s The Canyon of Babel, who (spoiler alert) discovers that an abandoned canyon is a library of multilingual echoes. He impresses every left-handed man, woman and child he can find into service cataloguing these echoes in the hopes of finding one in the “Language of Wisdom,” the language so perfect that knowledge of any one word would imply the whole language, and some metaphysical secrets besides. I guess if Reverend Casaubon had written his Key to all Mythologies in the Language of Wisdom, he could have fit it on the back of a postcard.

The tragedy of these quixotic archivists is their dawning realization that there’s no organizing principle, no grand unified theory tying all their knowledge together. When we meet the Curator in The History Eaters, he’s well on his way to that understanding, but it’s only Judith, the Librarian from Subodhana Wijeyeratne’s The Sentinel Gate, who has given up the notion of enlightenment and found a way to go on, writing in the sand in forgotten languages but sweeping her work away before it can be read. Maybe she understands her actions as a way of preserving the skills of literacy for future generations without fostering the illusion that writing is itself a means to lasting knowledge, and without adding more needless complexity to the labyrinth where she lives. But one thing Judith can’t preserve for posterity is her sad knowledge that there’s nothing to be found out in the maze. Despite Judith’s warnings, the young hero of the story is driven to journey out and read the gnomic inscriptions on the labyrinth walls for himself. Maybe that’s for the best.

Who’s to say Judith didn’t miss something?

Labyrinth Inhabitant Slush and Egosearch Report 2

With one story posted and two more acceptance emails sent, I'm closing in on the end of the submission period for issue 2. It's still a small zine, but the good news is that everything I've accepted has been well-written, mysterious, and appropriate to the labyrinth subgenre. The updated submission count is up to about 75, with 5 fiction acceptances and 2 poetry acceptances. I haven't seen much poetry lately, and I kind of miss it. The most common issue with rejected stories is still genre inappropriateness. A few extra pointers:

• It's not enough if the characters just live in a mysterious artificial environment. The plot of the story also has to be about addressing that mystery, either by resolving the mystery or learning to live with it. (Or just dying. Dying is allowed.) I hate to say I'd never take a romance story, for instance, but the mysterious setting would have to be a very major theme, if not the focus of the story.
• Also, if your character can easily come and go from the mysterious place that is the setting for your story, you may be in trouble. Part of the idea of a labyrinth story is that you're kind of stuck there, at least for the time being.
• The plot of the show Lost would make a good Labyrinth Inhabitant story (If it hadn't already been written! No fanfic!). The plot of Battlestar Galactica, or an X-Files episode, would get a sympathetic rejection letter.

Just today I googled "Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine" to see if it was listed on enough writers' market sites. I came across this encouraging note on the Novel and Short Story Writers' Market blog:

The editor sounds a little desperate on his blog, so if you have a story that fits his criteria, you should have a good shot at getting it up.

At least somebody noticed!

Labyrinth Inhabitant Slush Report

Well, I've learned that if you start a webzine with a bizarrely narrow focus and send a single email (to Ralan's) advertising it, you will get submissions! So far I've gotten 19 responses and sent out 2 acceptance emails, which probably makes me a huge softy in the world of science fiction editors. Observations:

I'm getting a lot of stuff about the actual Greek labyrinth with Daedalus and the minotaur. That's fine, but the labyrinth inhabitant subgenre is much broader than that! It's a subgenre about the problem of being born into an environment that is hard to understand because it's very complex, because it was built long in the past, because the reasons for building it are largely forgotten, and because it was built for the benefit of people who are now dead. In other words, labyrinth stories work as a metaphor for the problem of understanding one's place in an advanced technological society. That's a big subject.

A new entry for the "Elements I'd prefer not to see" list: works whose only connection to the labyrinth inhabitant subgenre is that they argue that the real world is the greatest labyrinth of all. (The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths doesn't count; one of those was a real labyrinth.)

I thought LIM would be mainly about stories with poem submissions far between. In fact, though, a lot of what I've gotten has been poetry. Maybe it's because LIM's rates don't scale very much. According to LIM's Duotrope entry, I'm paying "semi-pro" rates for poetry and stories under 500 words, although I'd probably never buy such a thing. (Again, The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths is an exception. I would pay a semi-pro rate for that.)

Also, I'm getting some stuff that's only kinda-sorta labyrinth-related. None of it has been flagrantly irrelevant, but stuff that seriously tries to be a part of the subgenre stands a much better chance with me.

Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine

I have established the web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension. The logo looks like this:



Right now I've got it parked at http://labyrinthinhabitant.110mb.com, but within a matter of days it should be up at its permanent address at www.labyrinthinhabitant.com. As of now I have zero authors, zero stories and zero readers.

June 14-15, Night and Early Morning

Never have I experienced a night of such confusion and blind stumbling in the dark. My evening’s work began in my study at the church, where I pushed aside all my normal cases, set a couple of volumes on estate law and procedure near to hand, and sought some scheme by which I could prise the possession of the factory out of the hands of the men who held it and return it to the widow. This process involved tracing out a few intuitions about the state of the law which I had formed in the carriage, and it was not helped along at all by My Dear, who hovered officiously at my shoulder with theories of her own.

"Withrow made himself a party to the glass-sellers’ contracts by accepting their debts as payment of the widow’s tithe," My Dear insisted. "And then he intentionally frustrated the contract by inciting the glass-sellers not to pay! All you have to do is hold him to account for the widow’s lost profits and make him acknowledge her tithe as paid. If she was not properly ejected from the church, then she was not properly dispossessed of the factory, and everything is undone!"

"My Dear, I assure you, I cannot. To hold the curate liable for a sermon he gave in his capacity as a church officer would violate the basic principle of separation of church and state. Sir Dodge wrote on this very point only the session before last. If I seem to misunderstand such a basic doctrine he will think me an imbecile, and that is an injury that no mere gift of flowers for his wife will undo!" After this outburst she left me alone, and although I regretted having to rebuke her, I was glad she understood that this was one realm in which she could be of no help to me. It would have been the work of a few minutes to rule against the widow, but it took several hours of study and composition to produce an adequate opinion in her favor. Its reasoning was attenuated, garbled, and in all probability applicable only to the specific facts of the widow’s case. I thought it might be studied in the academies for generations.

I was unable to justify returning the ownership of the factory to the widow outright. I accepted the validity of Riley’s transfer of a leasehold estate in the glassworks to Kale, but I ruled that the central furnace and other instruments were never annexed to the building, and they therefore could only have been leased to Kale by means of a separate contract. Finding no such document in existence, I ruled that Riley had created an implied covenant to operate the furnace to facilitate Kale’s use of the glassworks. This meant that Riley was obligated to provide an experienced manager for the glassworks at his own expense, and also to indemnify Kale against any expenses arising from failure or misuse of the glassmaking equipment. I anticipated that Kale would be willing to let the widow run the factory if it meant that her brother-in-law would take on the risk of any further catastrophe. My ruling would deal a ruinous financial blow to Riley, but that was acceptable.

I sketched out as authoritative an outline of my opinion as possible. The hour was already quite late, but My Dear and I agreed that I should return to the Riley estate that very night to make our proposal to the widow, since her family might spirit her away at any time, and there would most likely be no reaching her for a private conversation in the daytime in any case. During her visit, My Dear had subtly asked the widow where she slept: a bottom-floor room at the back of the house. My plan was to ride out on horseback, tap on her window and hope that no one would raise the alarm. If caught, I would simply claim than an informant had accused the widow of performing Satanic rites out in the swamp at midnight, and as Inquisitor in her case I had been obligated to investigate. I bribed the stable boy to let me take a horse out in secrecy, and I made the long journey back to Riley’s plantation with no more light than came from the half-full moon and a weak lantern that I often had to clutch to my chest as I grabbed at the reins to keep from falling from the starting creature. Twice my mount stumbled and I thought I would be thrown off the road into some ditch or bog, and when it began to rain I feared she would refuse to go on. Finally I arrived near the plantation and tied off the horse’s reins to a sapling away from the road. I removed my brown riding cloak to reveal my black robes beneath, which I believed would better hide me in the darkness. Silently praying that the occupants would not spy me and shoot me on sight, I crept behind the house to the window that My Dear had described, which was illuminated by the dim light of a guttering candle. I could distinguish movement in the shadows but nothing more, so instead of tapping I peered harder at the scene inside. To my shock I recognized the widow’s body, unclothed, and the larger arms of a man who embraced her, sharing her bed. I tried to see his face, but then I was gripped by terror as I heard footsteps racing toward me through the grass along the side of the house, very close. I could not even move before I was dealt a blow on the side of my face and knocked down into the muck. A hand covered my mouth and forced my cheek to the ground so I could not scream or even look up and see my assailant. I heard three taps at the widow’s window, and the shadows on the ground grew shorter. The widow, or her lover, was looking out at us.

More footsteps came around the house toward us and my captor allowed me to turn my face upward so that I could see the widow’s lover, still buttoning his shirt. It was the foreman from the glassworks. The one who had knocked me down was a large woman who I had not seen before, and the maid who had admitted me to the house that afternoon was standing a little apart, watching. The foreman, from whose belt hung a sheathed hunting knife, pointed out across the bog, and then the three of them bore me up against my struggles and began to carry me out into the darkness, the women’s arms looped under my shoulders and the man holding my legs at his side like a bundle of firewood. Soon I could hear the sucking sound of their boots being dragged through the mud, and save for the grizzled foreman they panted with exhaustion. There were also others walking alongside us, but I was unable to turn my head to see them.

The widow was the first to speak. "How far do you think voices will carry tonight?"

"Screaming carries for miles," the foreman said.

"Then we cover his mouth."

"I wouldn’t reckon on no screaming. Not to save us a short walk."

I tensed up to hear this exchange, but then they were silent for a while and the foreman made no threatening movement that I could distinguish, so I relaxed. I waited until the fat servant whose hand was clapped over my mouth was off-balance straddling some obstacle on the ground, tottering a little, and I lurched my whole body away from her arms using the foreman’s firm grip on my legs to give me leverage, striking at her so she stumbled away from me and dropped me on my back in the mud, leaving the terrified maid with only a grip on my left arm.

"You need me!" I whispered harshly. "I’m here to help! Don’t try to silence me or I’ll wake the Rileys to screams and a house empty of servants." The fat servant hesitated and looked to the foreman for help.

"I have a message for you," I said. "It’s a proposal. I can return the management of the glassworks to Ms. Riley. If you let me go I can return to the church and file my ruling. I have it right here in my coat."

"No light to read by, Judge," the foreman said, holding my legs up at an angle that seemed to make movement in any direction impossible.

"I ruled that her brother-in-law must indemnify Kale against any future accidents such as the one that happened yesterday, and provide a commercially acceptable, experienced manager for the glassworks. Naturally, Ms. Riley is the only option, and that means that Mr. Riley will have to pay for her readmission to the church so the townspeople will allow her to perform her duties. In exchange I ask only that my wife and I hold the exclusive commission to import the first shipments of glass objects to the capital, for a period of some months, open to discussion."

The widow now stood over me to speak. Her flashing eyes were like tapers in a skull. "Your ruling, whatever it is, is nothing but words. No words will protect us from men with the will to steal my factory and the power to hold it. We’ll sabotage the furnace until no one else dares to work it. Then I resume control, and manage it with people I trust. The rest of the village can work for me or starve. If it had been my choice alone, we never would have waited to hear your response to my petition before we acted." She moved to clap her own hand over my mouth, and the foreman pulled his knife from its sheath. For the first time, I entertained the thought of meeting my death under such circumstances, at the hands of a disgraced woman and her secret paramour. Absurd.

"My wife’s testimony will hang you all!" I said, not raising my voice in the slightest, not setting off the blind panic of the final mortal struggle. I pushed the widow’s hands away with a gesture. "Do you think she needs evidence? She was in the pigment room when the blasting powder was planted. No matter that she doesn’t know who did it; she’ll say that it was the widow herself! She will recall a figure in uniform who walked strangely like a woman and lurked in the room where we were, watching us. Do you think anyone would doubt a woman like my wife, bereaved, respectable? What about Kale, who sent me to interrogate you about the sabotage this very day? What about the curate who will hear your case, who accused you of witchcraft and was poisoned by your factory’s accursed glass?"

The maid who still held my arm was quaking with fear, but the fat woman, the one who had knocked me down, calmly looked to the foreman for direction. I addressed her. "And you! You’re the cook who made the widow eat, aren’t you? My wife knows your story. She knows she can avenge the widow’s crimes on you. She will begin to destroy you on the very first day. She will come with a group of villagers who she trusts and say that I went missing here--she will have a fine innocent explanation for my visit--and pointedly she’ll observe how filthy is the rose glassware, and she will have Riley’s wife make you scour it clean in front of her, and drink from it--" The widow slapped me across the face, but there was perfect silence until I recovered and began again.

"And when the Reverend Withrow has seized his excuse to convict you, My Dear will befriend the next circuit-rider who will come to Lemoine in another three years, and warn him about you. But that will do you no harm, because witchcraft is a capital crime and no judge takes appeals from a pile of ashes."

I let my words echo in their ears and propped myself up on my elbows. I became aware that two other servants, who had followed us but never laid a hand on me, had withdrawn into the darkness, fearful, I think, that I would see their faces. They carried spades. The nervous maid released my arm and spoke first. She begged the widow to accept my terms, and swore that she never cared whether she stayed in the Rileys’ service for the rest of her life, so long as she escaped the weight of the guilt and fear that their crime had laid on her.

We reached an arrangement, advantageous to my wife and me and with adequate provision for us to take some of the glass flowers from our shipments and dispose of them as we like. The widow Riley relit her candle and read my judgment, found it acceptable, and knee-deep in the swamp we shook leech-covered hands. I began to plot how to be absolutely certain to avoid the widow in public for the rest of my stay in Lemoine, and indeed forever. I have heard that it becomes necessary to make many such bargains, and develop a long register of such contraindicated people, as one’s political career blooms.

Given what had passed between us, none of my hosts offered to accompany me back to my horse, and I spent a long time wandering around in search of her. The journey back was difficult as well, as clouds rolled in across the moon and fatigue compounded upon confusion to slow our progress. Finally I returned my horse to the carriage team, which I hoped would not be taken out too early the next day lest someone notice that one horse was not fresh, and snuck into the guest house by a window that My Dear had promised to leave unbolted. I crept up to her room and tapped on the door, twice high and once low. She admitted me and I gave her my filthy robe to hide. I reassured her that I was alright, and explained to her about the foreman and our bargain.

"That’s wonderful. It will be all right if Lemoine glass is coming in to the capital when we arrive, so long as for Lady Dodge we have the widow create something unique. And very large."

"It wasn’t in the agreement I made with the widow."

"Don’t feel sorry for her. She understands that she has to pay a price." She smiled merrily. "You’ve done it!"

She kissed me. I embraced her and kissed her again, but she held me back.

"You have to go," she said. She explained to me that every time that Withrow had come to the door searching for me, she had made sounds of passion and refused to acknowledge him. This had infuriated Withrow, who promised not to sleep until I was in my own bed, and threatened to have the door unscrewed from its hinges.

"Try to be seen," My Dear said as she sent me out the door. To this end I took a long route back to my cell, passing not only through the courtyard but also the much-trafficked servants’ area downstairs. I spied a dim light in the kitchen and I looked inside to see a couple of Imps, both drunk, and watched them make merry by the embers of a fire in the brick oven for a short time before they noticed me. One of them was a gaunt girl with dark eyes and withered legs. She propped herself up against the table as she drank. The other could have been a young grandmother, sly-looking and toughened by hard living, though she seemed greatly loosened up by drink at the moment.

The girl affected a high, falsely aristocratic voice as she swung her rose goblet, which still refracted the light in vibrant vermilion despite its filthiness. "Oh yes. Pardon me. Marvelous. And if I may say so, mankind could learn a _lot_ from the common apple maggot, my dear Lady...Loathesimia."

The old woman drained her glass and smirked mischievously. "Is that so? How charming, Lady _Pigs__t_."

The girl doubled over with laughter and clutched at the table. "You know...you know, this is such a special occasion, Lady Loathesimia, that we’re drinking the communion wine, which is the only magical wine in the whole valley. If this was Sunday I could change it into Godsblood. But because you’re such a noble lady, I’ll change it into the Holy Mother’s Piss. This is very special. All you have to do is say a prayer over it...and pour some on the floor as an offering..."

"Oh, no, Lady Pigs__t, I believe you must _not_ pour some on the floor as an offering."

"You’re right. Next we don’t pour any wine on the floor as an offering. And look! It’s piss!"

Lady Pigs__t emptied the rest of the bottle into their glasses and gave it to Lady Loathsimia, who concealed it at the back of a high cabinet full of empty bottles. Then the two Imps drained their goblets, hurled them at the back of the brick oven, and stirred the embers to hide the shards.

June 14, Afternoon

The road to Riley’s house was a sort of shored-up dirt path, ready to collapse at any moment into the acres of moss-covered slough that crowded it in on both sides for miles. I began to fancy that I was on my way to some fairy-castle hidden away at the heart of this noisome labyrinth, but no: Riley’s bogs were his kingdom. I discerned a few men scattered in the distance, dredging their way along half-submerged in the muck, planting or tending some crop in anticipation of the far-off harvest. The Rileys’ homestead itself was a fairly substantial two-storey structure in the German half-timbered style, with several outbuildings to house the laborers at a decent distance. The maid met me on the front porch, I introduced myself, and she immediately asked if I was here to see the widow. I answered with some surprise that I was, and she led me through the kitchen toward a tiny sitting room with carpentry tools hanging from the walls and no two chairs the same, though there were several cabinets full of rose glassware of the old kind: ornate plates and goblets in many discordant styles, organized only by size. I could see the back of a seated grey-haired woman by the doorway, and on the other side of the room, sanguinely standing to greet and introduce me, was my wife.

"You were able to pull yourself away!" she said to me. "Darling, I’m so pleased."

"You honor me, Judge Cushing," the widow said. Her clothing was even worse than it had been when I saw her the day before: having been interrupted at work, she wore a plain white garment of little more than rags stained all over, evidently designed so that she could be set to filthy tasks without any fear of ruining good fabric. Given what I knew about her now, I could not but think of this garb as a strange costume into which she had been forced by happenstance, while her true guise laid waiting for her in some nearby wardrobe.

"The honor is mine," I said graciously, though I could say no more because I had no idea what pretense had excused my wife’s visit, and was supposed to have brought me as well. Though she had plainly meant to conceal her presence here from me, she seemed to have no concern that I would ruin her charade.

"I gave the quilt to Mrs. Riley," My Dear said to me, pointing to a table where lay the blanket that the glass-broker had given to us the night before, now bound by a silk ribbon tied in a bow, no doubt torn from some precious garment from our luggage. To the widow she said, "When my husband heard your sad story he promised that we would not let our stay in Lemoine pass without giving you a bereavement gift."

The widow bowed her head and said, "You are very kind, your honor."

"You were saying that after your poor husband passed away, you maintained his legacy by operating his factory for some time," My Dear said.

"I did. For eleven months. And then they took the glassworks from me and brought me out here."

"We had the pleasure of meeting your brother-in-law and his wife at our welcoming dinner last night," My Dear said. "But I can’t help but wonder whether, even though they are your family, you might not have been a little happier before you were with them?"

"A little happier." The widow laughed ironically. "Have you wondered why the servants’ quarters are filled with Lemoine glass? In the old days, rose glass was kept under lock and key. But when it began to kill its users, we received crates of glass every day in the mail from customers who cursed us and wholesalers demanding refunds. The respectable people of Lemoine could not bear for the glass to go to waste, so they gave it to their servants, who they believed had neither knowledge nor any concern about threats to their constitution. To drink from rose glass is now expected of every member of the subservient class. Anything else would be considered presumptuous."

"That’s terrible," My Dear said.

"I want to show you one of them." The widow went to one of the cabinets and brought out a heavy, long-stemmed wineglass. "During my servitude, I’ve learned to recognize the way that small marks memorialize long and painful struggles between bodies animate and inanimate. Can you see the way that the glass is much thinner on the bottom of this glass than it is by the rim? Its owner must have made his servant scrape it clean with a scouring-pad, hard, every time he drank from it. Imagine the number of hours that women must have spent polishing to wear down the insides of every glass in this cabinet, grain by grain. And when she was done cleaning, the glass-dust and poisonous pigment that she had scraped off remained in the bottom of the goblet. It mixed with the next glassful of wine or mead and the master drank it down until his body was petrified and his mind destroyed." She let us look into the glass to see the servants’ own way of avoiding this fate. The glass was filthy, its inside encrusted with old, hardened mead.

"Even so, I must drink from the rose glass like everyone else, because it is my place. I have no happiness here. Only a place."

"And if you were ever to return to the management of the glassworks," My Dear said to her, "no doubt new complications arising from suspicion of your product abroad would require you to retain...an agent..." The sound of Reuben Riley’s wife stomping her way to the servants’ quarters, unfortunately, forced My Dear to lapse into silence.

Riley’s wife stood in the doorway with an expression of theatrical surprise, pleased or displeased, I could not tell. The moment seemed suspended between us, gathering weight and import upon the fulcrum of her arched eyebrow. She had seemed a small, unassuming woman on her husband’s arm at dinner the night before, but now her face went sour.

"Are you the one receiving guests, now?" she asked of the widow. "This must be our new parlor."

"No, ma’am, I..."

"I suppose I needn’t even be told when company comes to my home. Was your plan to bring them down to your dirty rat’s nest and send them off again with me none the wiser?"

"No, m..."

"Do you want me to cut you loose, Pearl? If you can’t take living in my house then you can say the word. I bet that’s why you’re acting up. You want to end up at the church, don’t you?"

"No, ma’am." The widow looked straight forward and spoke flatly, her eyes focused on nothing.

"That’s good, because I’ll never send you there. I’m not going to let you bring more shame upon this family. I’ll have you off to the farm at Cudworth as soon as I can spare so much as a mule." Only once her tirade was done did Mrs. Riley seem to notice us.

"I should apologize," My Dear said. "I came uninvited, to offer my condolences. I beg you to blame me for the intrusion."

Mrs. Riley curtsied. "No, ma’am. It’s her. She causes trouble. I’m sorry I can’t receive you today; I have another engagement and Mr. Riley is not at home."

"There is one more thing," I said. "It is incumbent upon me to question Pearl Riley about the recent accident at the glassworks." Mrs. Riley assented, but then she simply sank down into one of the chairs and watched the widow like a hungry owl.

"Did you have anything to do with the explosion in the furnace yesterday afternoon?" I asked the widow.

"No. I returned here from my errand to the post office yesterday morning, and have been here ever since," the widow said. "I know nothing about any explosion. These days news of the glassworks comes to me late, if at all."

I sat thinking about her response, stymied. I could do nothing to advance our cause with Mrs. Riley present.

"Fine," I said. "That will be all." Then My Dear and I retired to the carriage.

"She meant to make a bargain with us," My Dear said once we were well down the road, in low tones so the driver would not overhear. "She would give anything to have the factory again. She is desperate. Is that not what her mistress was hinting at, her willingness even to live in Withrow’s cloister to be nearer the glassworks?"

I agreed, and we decided between the two of us that we would make the widow an offer as soon as possible, though I can hardly imagine what ruling of mine could restore to her what she has lost. To do that, I would have to reverse the depredations of her husband’s family, and the cruelty of the church and the opinions of all the townspeople. I would have to nullify the concept of property and ban the village of Lemoine from the face of the Earth, and perhaps reach back to the beginning of time to overrule God’s original act of Predestination, which made the weak and unfortunate subject to the powerful and righteous. If I can help the widow Riley, it will be by cruder and less honest means.

Next

June 14, Morning

Awoke refreshed. Unpleasantness of last night seemed to have been forgotten. The Reverend Withrow was nowhere to be seen, but his Imps had set out an excellent breakfast for My Dear and me. I agreed that she could take our carriage to go visiting in town, as I planned to spend all day in the parsonage reviewing cases. But I had hardly begun the day’s work when a courier came in with a strange message from Kale. It read: "I am sorry if I have given you any offense during our brief acquaintance, but if I have I beg you to set it aside and assist us for the sake of the peace of our small town. Inspection of our furnace reveals signs of sabotage. As you have graciously offered to act as inquisitor in this matter I beg you to come to the glassworks and take our evidence. Yr. Srvt., Vincent Kale." It seemed that my efforts to simplify matters had only succeeded in entangling me more deeply in local controversy, but given what had passed between Withrow and me the night before it was too late for me to relent and let him have the reins of the investigation. I accepted transport to the factory from Kale’s courier. Upon my arrival I assured Kale that I had no dislike for him and any antipathy on my wife’s part, if antipathy it really be, was no more than a woman’s flight of emotion, illogical, influenced far more by the discomfort of travel and certain disturbing news from home than by Kale’s own behavior, and probably already forgotten.

The warped furnace was far from ready to be lit again, but most of the glass had been chipped away, and a couple of engineers crouched inside the crucible, pounding away at its inside. We joined the foreman who had been on duty at the time of the explosion and Benediction Dalton, the elder owner of the mine, who stood gazing at the furnace and speculating tersely to one another. The work floor was otherwise deserted, the finished glass gone. Kale pointed out a little bolus of white powdery residue which had been left on the floor. Apparently one of the glassworkers, being a former employee of the mines, had recognized the lumps of matter left behind when they scraped up the glass as the same as were left behind by detonations of the blasting powder that was used to blow up the sides of mountains in pursuit of copper.

"There couldn’t have been more than a gallon of powder in your furnace or your whole operation would have gone the way of Barkley Peak’s east face," the old miner said. "We’d hardly miss a barrel of it up on the mines. The men take great handfuls of it and pack it in mortars. Stack ‘em at the base of the cliff like bricks. We don’t frisk ‘em on their way home, neither; we’re not a gold mine."

"What about on our end, then?" Kale asked his foreman.

"It’s only works gangs that strike the kegs and grind up the stones," the foreman said. "Ain’t no gang of men could agree in secret to set a hazard like to kill or maim their fellows. But I known stones to come in blasted d__n near to powder already. Could be some miner spied some ore he thought precious, he swapped it out for a kegful of blast powder left unguarded, and our men never saw no difference."

"You and me both know every stone we sell ye for pigment, and I know the blast powder. Ain’t no fool could mistake one for the other," Dalton snapped.
The foreman thought about this, unhurriedly. "Then somebody poured that powder down the pipe and run off fast. It would a heated to burn in a couple three minutes."

"One of the men poured it in while we were touring the pigment room, knowing he wouldn’t be recognized behind his mask," I said.

"This is your fault," Kale said to the foreman. "You said the men wouldn’t work the pigments without full facemasks."

"And so they wouldn’t," the foreman said.

"If we can’t identify the person behind the mask, perhaps we ought to consider who had a motive for the crime," I said. Kale and the foreman had been staring at one another in a contest of wills, but now all eyes turned on me.

"I will speak with the widow," I said. Kale was kind enough to grant me the use of his carriage once again for the journey to Riley’s plantation.

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