So, it has come time to reveal the wonderful cover of a new collection by one of my favorite authors — I wrote about how I am ride or die for Premee Mohamed here at the blog, and this collection, which I’m reading now, only proves why. Her work features such deep empathy, there to ground the big, gnarly ideas contained within. You’re going to want this, so let’s just jump right into the cover reveal for her next collection, coming out with Psychopomp in February: One Message Remains. — cdw
One Message Remains was deserving of a cover as unique as its words. Artist John G. Reinhart has accomplished that here, with something dreamy and otherworldly. Christine M. Scott’s clean cover design makes for a nice balance. Gaze upon it!
EXCERPT — One Message Remains, by Premee Mohamed
My dearest wife,
Major Lyell Tzajos frowned at his letter, if you could refer to it as such at this stage of development. So far it was just a salutation. And a slightly awkward one, no? At home, he didn’t call her “wife” any more than she called him “husband.” He crossed it out and wrote below it:
Dear Mariye,
Then he paused again, the pencil-tip resting against the gridded paper of his army-issued notebook. Something in her last letter had angered him, something he wanted to refute at once, but he had mistakenly left the letter back at headquarters six weeks ago. He shifted uncomfortably on the low equipment chest on which he had unwisely chosen to rest, the cold metal draining heat through his trousers, and stared out at the horizon, or where he thought it probably was; here, it was rarely a line dividing earth and sky, only a place where the fog changed color, like partly wetted paper. Ah! Now he remembered.
He wrote,
Of course our mission is not a punishment. Where did you get such a scurrilous idea, and why are you repeating it to me like any town gossip? If it was from the Tribune, then I order you to cancel our subscription to that rag at once. I have had enough of letting you “sweet-talk” me into allowing you to keep it. It shows great disrespect. Our mission happens to be an honor. For the sake of accuracy, allow me to clarify what we are doing here and wh
“’Scuse me, sir.”
Tzajos looked up as his second-in-command, Captain Yather, approached in a kind of sidewise scuttle, like a land crab. Yather was a tall man at home and conspicuously tall here, and had taken to various contortions to seem less threatening. Tzajos reminded himself to have a word with the man later: it was unseemly, even if it was not technically against regulations. “Captain?”
“We got a, uh. You know. Locals.”
Tzajos accepted the pair of field glasses Yather handed him: yes, not more than fifty or so yards to the northeast of their site, a handful of figures in the fog. “Well,” he said uneasily, “I suppose there’s no law against watching us work.”
“Nossir,” said Yather.
Tzajos hated this kind of thing, hated even more that his hands were trembling as he returned the field glasses. The men were watching him now, all paused in their work, seeing what he would do. Their eyes on him like hands, reminding him of the unfriendly nudges and shoves he’d gotten last time he was in a pub in the capital, spilling his drink. Oh ho ho, let’s see what the pencil-pushing little prig does now. Tzajos was a compact, tidy-looking man, well within the acceptable height and weight range for the draft, but something about him made him seem not only small but cropped, as if he had been trimmed to reduce even what meager portion nature had given him. The men often appended little to the jibes they thought he could not hear.
He tightened his jaw. “However,” he added, “one may infer they’ve been approaching us for some time, unseen. Therefore perhaps with hostile intent.”
“Could be, sir.”
“Take a couple of men and frighten them off, captain,” he said loudly. He did not dare look around to see the faces of the men; even the suspicion that they were laughing made him blush, which would be painfully conspicuous with his fair skin and hair. “Go on. Use the flares. Or no. Wait. Live ammunition, if you please.”
Yather hesitated, then turned to the young soldiers behind them. “All right, you lot, tools down a mo.’ Volunteers? Yes, you’ll do. With me.”
In mere moments, the three men were immersed in the fog, invisible, their footsteps silent on the grass. Tzajos held his breath and hated himself for it: a silly little man, yes, just as they muttered under their breaths, a silly little posh prig with a la-dee-dah accent and a fussy little mustache who had no right to command this mission… He swallowed, flinched, rammed his hands into his trouser pockets as the flares went off, even though he had approved their use.
A crackling roar from the tiny cartridges, magnified and deepened by the fog. A sphere of pink light. The sound of unseen birds winging away. Then faint shouting, and a couple of small-caliber reports. As always, even the sound of the guns made him feel light-headed. He had no idea how he had survived basic training. How long ago it seemed, five years, the start of the war…
Yather and the two privates returned, squelching across the wet turf. “Drove ’em off, sir. No contact. Had the men fire into the air.”
“Thank you, Yather.” Tzajos raised his voice for the benefit of the others and added, “No harm done if you had though, eh? Dragonish hides as they’ve all got?”
No one laughed. Tzajos had heard the men make a variation on this joke a thousand times since they’d started; what had he gotten wrong? He swallowed again, hearing his throat click, and added, “Right. Well. Are we…are we ready to proceed again?”
“Mule’s workin’ again, sir,” someone called—one of the mechanics, spackled in grey mud from head to toe, like a gargoyle. The Mule was what the men called their temperamental pneumatic excavator, since enlisted men (Tzajos had begun to realize) gave a nickname to everything from their mess kits to local landmarks. He, meanwhile, stubbornly continued to refer to it using its asset name.
“Very well,” Tzajos said over the rattling hiss of the engine getting up to steam. “Permission to resume.” That was the mission plan, that kept things organized and efficient, he had drawn it up himself: one sector opened up as the next was recovered, followed by closure concomitant with the next sector being opened up. No idleness, every man-hour accounted for! They were not in this foreign land on holiday!
Tzajos looked around for the Teleplasm Recovery Unit in its heavy brass case, finally locating it next to the excavator, also covered in mud. “Private! What is the meaning of this?”
The mechanic wriggled out of the coal compartment and made an effort to clean his face somewhat. “Sir?”
“The recovery unit.”
“Oh! Well, she were acting up last night, sir, so I gave ’er a check this morning—”
“What was the issue specifically? Did you complete the formal inspection checklist?”
The mechanic frowned, mud flaking from his forehead. “No sir, on account of that’s an official task of which I myself was not assigned to do.”
“Then why did you ‘give it a check,’ private?”
“She…she were acting up. Can’t have things acting up.”
Tzajos picked up the case, grimacing at the filthy handle. He would never understand these men, never. What was the compulsion to simply fiddle about with things unless you had official orders? You could be written up for that. He himself tried to model ideal military behavior, never as much as touching the equipment unless it was part of the mission plan.
Somehow the fog had grown even thicker; visibility was down to a few paces. Tzajos slid his boots rather than walking as he neared the excavation, letting it appear gradually, its edges claggy, grey, more like cement than soil. Next to it lay the cut turf they had rolled up like a medieval manuscript, ornamented appropriately with wildflowers, sprouting herbs, the grasping white fingers of roots. Remarkable, really. The tenacity. How anything managed to grow in this stuff. Bit like the people.
Tzajos set the unit down carefully, grateful to be relieved of the burden, grateful also that over a month and a half of constantly hauling it around (as the commanding officer, he was the only one approved to use it) he no longer grunted or whimpered when lifting it. He did not feel materially stronger, but something had been quietly compensating in his arms or back, and he thanked it. Bone gleamed out of the muck, first revealed then polished by the Mule’s pressurized hydro-vacuum hoses. A successful find; but as this corroborated the official sector map he had been using, he felt vindicated rather than gratified to see it confirmed.
“Mark it,” he said to Yather. The captain dug the map out of his satchel and squatted on his haunches, head still level with Tzajos’s ribcage, and glanced around for the bright red flags of their distance markers. Very good; Tzajos had stressed upon all the men the importance of those markers, of placing them deeply in the turf, and it seemed to have sunk in at last. You had to be precise. No sense doing half a job.
“Marked,” Yather said, showing his notebook page.
“Thank you. Right. Distance, please.” Tzajos stooped next to the excavation, opened the case, activated the device, and waited as the internal engine hummed up to pressure. It sounded all right; what had the private been talking about? Perhaps slightly rougher than usual, but it was barely perceptible and might easily have been a result of sitting there in the mud, instead of its elevated leather frame. Hmm. Maybe he should write the man up, after all. It would be a lesson to the rest of them.
When the indicator needle hovered at fifty pounds per square inch, Tzajos flipped the switch and held the funnel steady as whatever remained of the dead men’s teleplasm rose from the bones, entering the collector receptacle in a thin violet fog. Strange to look at it, see it the same as our own, isn’t it. You’d think it would look different. But then, so many peoples of the world. Maybe not enough colors to cover them all. Or not able to perceive the difference…well, the army tested you for color vision before you could join, and—
Tzajos did not hear the bang, only the echoes of it returning to him muffled and soft in the fog, and he did not see the flash, only feel its dazzling imprint as he blinked again and again, unable to stop his eyes trying to recover their vision. Gradually he became aware of Yather pulling him up, calling his name.
“I’m all right, I… What happened?”
“Not sure, sir. Sounded like one of them stunners went off, except smaller. Like a cherry-bomb.”
Tzajos rubbed his left ear, which was still ringing. Fortunately he had dropped the recovery unit at the edge of the excavation instead of into it; the unit did not seem to have sustained any damage, and indeed was still running. He picked it up, wary of a repeat of whatever had happened, but the indicators appeared normal and even the engine sounded normal now. Perhaps it had not been the unit at all; perhaps he had simply had a funny turn and blamed it on the thing.
Right on schedule, the status light turned from amber to green, and it unceremoniously jettisoned the sealed cube of teleplasm from the nacelle, which Tzajos was used to by now, catching it deftly before it fell into the hole. He labelled it with a grease-pencil and put it in his satchel, hearing the celluloid edges clunk dully against the others collected this morning before the Mule had broken down. A bag full of achievements, each carrying him closer to the end of the mission, to promotion, celebration, veneration.
“Effects, sir,” said one of the privates inside the hole, handing Tzajos a black bag. He accepted the cold, sodden package between thumb and forefinger, and murmured something about getting back on schedule.
With practiced distaste, he ungimmicked the complicated ties and folds, opening the thick oiled leather to reveal a mass of papers barely damp on their edges. This too no longer surprised him; nearly all of the dead soldiers had been buried with journals, letters, books, pocket watches, and rings in bags like this—things that any reasonable man would have insisted be sent to their families postmortem. Instead the dead clutched them tight, in graves so shallow that any passing wildlife could easily root them up and scatter their remains. A beastly practice in every definition, Tzajos thought. Like dogs burying a bone six inches down, uncaring of what happens to it next, because dogs don’t know what a future is or how to think about it. At least they hadn’t been in mass graves, as everyone had expected.
At any rate, as the commanding officer, it was his responsibility to ensure everything was read, cataloged, preserved, and transported back to headquarters in order to correctly match physical and teleplasmic remains to names of the dead. The burden of superiority!
He opened the topmost item, a thin green notebook like the kind given to schoolchildren, and glanced at the first line in its clumsily curled printing—They say the havuvara have weapons that the world has never even HEARD of—then put it back in the bag. More efficient to batch everything together and read it all at once after the day’s work was done, as he usually did.
As per regulations, the men worked until sunset, then retired to the steam-tracks for the last tasks of the day, wearily traversing the ladders bolted between the high rubber treads, occasionally cursing or slipping if exposed anatomy touched the hot metal of the engine or steam-lines. Twilight dyed the grey soil a vivid blue. Cubes: arranged in spark-proof wooden crates. Bones and teeth: bagged in sanitary cellulose sacks. Sacks: labeled in three locations, stored in individual waterproofed cardboard boxes. Boxes: labeled on all sides.
“The least we can do for the poor beggars is a proper job,” Tzajos said to Yather as they finally trudged up the steps of their transport and settled into the damp, sooty cab. “The very least. I always think—not even at the political level. But as humans. The least we can do is offer assistance to a defeated enemy.” From the back, just audible through the grate separating the compartments, he could faintly hear the men talking, singing, some already snoring. Was the interpreter in this one?
Tzajos squirmed around in his seat as Yather started the engine, raising his voice over the noise. “Calamuk! Are you back there?”
The interpreter climbed over the other men and brought his face to the thin metal grate: a thin face, ruddy brown, dark blue eyes encircled by matching dark blue smears of exhaustion. “Sir.”
Tzajos said, “What does havuvara mean, lieutenant?”
Was that the shadow of the grate flickering across the man’s eyes, or something else? After a moment he said, “Who said it?”
“A dead soldier. In his journal.”
Again the pause. “A kind of insect, unwanted. You would say roach or cockroach.”
“I see.” Tzajos dismissed the man and drummed his fingers on the console, raising the faint odor of wet leather. He prided himself on his mastery of the enemy tongue—Dastian was a devil of a language compared to the ones he had studied in university. Not so much the vocabulary, needing only rote memorization, but the way everything shifted depending on the speaker. An unattributed word had, essentially, no useful meaning. What on Earth kind of language was that? In his own tongue if you said “roach” it always meant “roach,” no matter who said it or when, dead or alive, no matter whether it was printed in a book or scribbled on a wall.
Anyway. Let the dead boy call them whatever he wanted. Heavens knew armies the world over had nasty terms for the enemy, always had, always would. He was dead, virtually all the Dastian soldiers were dead, Eastern Seudast was crushed, pacified, and occupied, end of story. Soon enough their language would die too, replaced by Treotan. Once the schools were up and running, once you trained the kids to be properly ashamed of speaking the tongue of the defeated, to tell their families not to speak it at home…might take a few generations. What of it?
What happened next to this place really did not matter to Tzajos. He would be far from here, lauded for this mission of mercy, the unexpected kindness of the triumphant nation showing that they really did care—that they had come to recover all these remains and treat them with proper respect, and give them back to the Dastians instead of leaving them to languish in battlefields far from their homes. And he would be promoted, commended… That was one thing. The extra money, the stripes and dots, those were one thing. He would be respected. That was the other thing. That mattered. When he was back in civilization again, instead of in this raw and weeping wound of a land, he would be treated with proper respect. For once in his life. For once in his entire life.
How many of the men had seen him faint near the hole today? He hoped only a few. At any rate, at least it wasn’t another equipment malfunction; the Recovery Unit had worked flawlessly for the rest of the day. They had been plagued by difficulties for the entire mission so far, and there were still six months (six months!) to go. The unit of twenty included two mechanics; perhaps he should have requested more before setting out.
As if reading his mind, Yather said, “Might need to allot an extra day at the next village, sir, if it’ll fit in the schedule. Ruran tells me there’s so much mud up in the works that the only way to get the Mule and some of the steam-tracks workin’ properly again is to disassemble the engine compartments and suchlike, clean everything out, and put it back together.”
“A day? I suppose we could manage a single day. I did build some contingency time into the schedule.”
“It would be much appreciated, sir.”
“Ruran… He’s the bigger one, yes? With the red hair?”
“No, sir.” Yather’s tone was only lightly reproachful. “That’s the other mechanic. Garawe. I can see how you’d get them mixed up, though, as they’re usually workin’ on the same thing. Ruran was the one you were talking to this morning.”
“Of course.” Tzajos blushed again, glad no one could see it now. He and Yather had met at headquarters six weeks ago, just before mobilization, and yet the captain had instantly gotten to know all the men, while Tzajos, who had reviewed the detailed personnel folders a half-dozen times, still could not keep them straight. He hated that about himself because it was something he could not change no matter how diligently he studied. And when was the last time study had not solved one of his problems?
Tzajos glared out the windscreen at the landscape bumping and rattling around them, minimally illuminated in pale gold by the steam-track’s headlamps. Grass, flowers, bushes, mile after mile of undulating, undeveloped meadow. He glanced into the rear-view mirror to gauge the dark and wavering track of mud they’d left behind them. Well. It was spring; that would grow over in no time.
He was looking forward to summer, and drier conditions. The equipment they’d brought was all meant for civilization, which was to say back home in Treotan, which was to say paved roads, or at least dry soil. What a lot of setbacks they’d had so far! Broken-down machinery, minor injuries, prying locals, one brief but disastrous bout of food poisoning, incorrectly stowed equipment meaning a day-long backtrack to a previous site, fuel shortages, inoperative cabling stations, biting flies…nothing really worth writing home about, he admitted, but they simply never stopped. And look at this: one of the sodding little local lizards, blue and brown, right here in the cab! No doubt preparing to empty its parasite-infested bowels onto Tzajos’s shoulder. He glared at it; it glared back.
On the other hand, the successful overcoming of these setbacks would look good in his official report and (if he was being honest) the book he intended to find a publisher for when he returned. Their mission was noble, and only made more noble by these travails, that was the spin he’d put on it. It would sell like hotcakes. And it would show people back home what it was really like out here in the theater of war, never mind that he had not been in active combat. He’d sort that out later. A few evocative details would suffice.
One feels as if one were on another planet, he imagined himself writing. In a nicely-appointed office in a house—not the sitting room back in his pokey little flat—on one of those new-fangled type-writers that cost six months pay. It must be bright red enamel with gold trim, like the demonstration machine that the pretty girl typed on at the stationery shop to draw buyers in.
There are no streets and no street lamps, no sign-posts, no bridges, dykes, houses, inns, barns, fences, in short, not a single sign of civilization for dozens of miles at a time. One night we traveled quite literally from dusk till dawn (they had, too; since there was nowhere to stop, they simply had to switch out drivers every few hours) without seeing anything created by human intelligence. Only grass and sky. Nine hours of pitch darkness emphasized rather than diminished by the wobbling orbs of the head-lamps in the infernal, neverending mist, and he thought they were all going to go mad before morning. He, for one, nearly cheered when he finally saw the tiny specks of candlelight in the distance showing that the village on their map was real, did exist, was not a phantom created by some bored cartographer back home, and was only a few hundred miles off from where it was supposed to be.
Or a phantom created by the villagers themselves, an illusion… Tzajos was a modern man. He did not believe in magic; he knew that there had been a period in the long-ago past when people of his nation and others took it seriously, because they had no other explanation for natural phenomena. In Treotan, magic was supposed to be a gift of the gods; here in Seudast it was said to come from the land itself, like a mineral dissolved in the soil or something. Either way, it was just an idea. Not real. But after that terrible night if you had told him that magic was real, and that the Dastians practiced it, and were using it to hoodwink him and his men, he would certainly have believed it, and with his whole heart.
He shuddered, then comforted himself by imagining the writing, again on the imaginary type-writer, his manicured fingers (yes, he must get a manicure when he got back—the moment he got back) on the heavy, curved keys. War, this future Tzajos typed, has a way of changing the beliefs and morals of weak-minded men. However, those of a more upright and circumspect bent, such as officers, are aware of this effect, and make every effort to combat it in themselves and in the men they command.
Such as officers? Such as myself. Well, never mind. The book had to wait till he got back and could tell the full story of the mission, start to finish.
Pageantry, pomp, pretense, and peril—”The General’s Turn,” originally published in The Deadlands, drew readers into the dark world of a ceremony where Death herself might choose to join the audience…or step onto the stage.
Award-winning author Premee Mohamed presents three brand new stories set in this morally ambiguous world of war and magic. In “One Message Remains,” Major Lyell Tzajos leads his team on a charity mission through the post-armistice world of East Seudast, exhuming the bones and souls of dead foes for repatriation. But the buried fighters may have one more fight left in them—and they have chosen their weapons well.
In “The Weight of What is Hollow,” Taya is the latest apprentice of a long-honored tradition: building the bone-gallows for prisoners of war. But her very first commission will pit her skills against both her family and her oppressor.
Finally, in “Forsaking All Others,” ex-soldier Rostyn must travel the little-known ways by night to avoid his pursuers, for desertion is punishable by death. As he flees to the hoped-for sanctuary of his grandmother’s village, he is joined by a fellow deserter—and, it seems, the truth of a myth older than the land itself.
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist numerous other awards, including the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Crawford. In 2024 she was the Edmonton Public Library official writer-in-residence. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.
One Message Remains (February 11, 2025) can be preordered from Psychopomp, in paperback and ebook editions.
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