Beneath Ceaseless Skies #354, April 21, 2022
“Valor Bones” by Derrick Boden
“The Heart in Her Hands” by Robert Minto
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Two characters who discover that people close to them have committed murder appear in this issue.
In “Valor Bones” by Derrick Boden, a young woman runs into a bog after the death of a boarder at her home. A living being emerges from a welt on her body, caused by one of the frequent beatings she suffers at the hands of her mother. The creature grows over time, accumulating discarded objects, as the woman returns to visit it. It is able to speak, but can only repeat the words of others. What she hears from it uncovers a series of crimes.
The author writes in an engaging manner, with vivid descriptions of the bog and the weird thing that lives in it. The reader is likely to predict what the creature reveals to the woman. Its existence seems like an arbitrary bit of fantasy thrown into the story; for plot purposes, it might as well be a tape recorder.
The narrator of “The Heart in Her Hands” by Robert Minto is a food taster for a queen, ensuring that her meals do not contain poison. He is in love with the daughter of an alchemist. The young woman has an obsessive interest in the workings of anatomy, experimenting on living and dead animals. When her curiosity turns from literal bodies to the abstract body of the government, the narrator must choose between his duty and his passion.
The alchemist’s daughter is an intriguing character, caring only for the results of her experiments. She even deliberately poisons the narrator and then saves his life in a strange fashion, just to study the result. (In some ways, she resembles a fantasy version of the classic Mad Scientist.) Such a character might have become a stereotype, but the author manages to make her seem real. Multiple flashbacks are used in a carefully crafted way, so that the narrator’s past ties in with the present to result in a tightly knit plot.
Victoria Silverwolf notes that both stories in this issue have anatomical titles.