Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  The night nurse on duty in the Rookery’s infirmary was a human man, but he shared a lot of features with a particularly venal fox. Not that anybody would ever awaken a fox.

  Even as we pushed through the doors, he picked up the speaking horn connected to the Rookery’s internal communications system. Cool Charles flapped up onto his desk and put a talon on the man’s hand. “You’ll want to hear this,” he said. “Seriously.”

  The man eyed the package I set before him speculatively, and put down the speaking horn. “What can I do for you?” he asked. His voice was more like a weasel’s.

  “We’re here to visit Dr. Sedgewick,” I said. “We won’t be long, just a few minutes to check up on his condition.”

  “You’re a doctor?” the man asked doubtfully.

  “Just visitors,” I said.

  He glanced at a log on his desk. “Orders are that he only be visited by relatives.”

  I nudged the package toward him. “We’re his cousins,” I said.

  When we got to the room, Dr. Sedgewick was awake, and apparently well on the mend—he was grading papers. He wielded a double-ended pencil with sharpened blue and red points, quickly marking passages, underlining and circling, scribbling notes. He flipped the pencil back and forth often, utilizing a color code I couldn’t make any sense of at a glance. His head was bandaged, but his eyes were clear.

  “Dr. Sedgewick, my name is Connolly Marsh. This is my colleague, Charles. I’ve been hired by Thomasina Swallow to investigate the circumstances surrounding your injury.”

  He looked me up and down. “A dog,” he said. “A lying dog.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, genuinely startled.

  “I was warned you might show up,” the man said. “I know all about you, dog. I know you were kicked off the police force and I know why. Well, you’ll not involve me in any of that. I’m a reputable scholar, do you hear me? You trot right along. Go home. Go home!”

  You run into this kind of talk sometimes. You try not to let it get you down.

  “Come on, Connolly,” said Charles. “Nothing to learn here.”

  “Just a minute.” I took a deep breath, fighting down a growl. “What did they give you?”

  Sedgewick looked down his pitiful little nose at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, and the lie absolutely reeked.

  “Your field is linguistic analysis. Somehow you got hold of an underground pamphlet—maybe somebody paid you to look at it, maybe even somebody I used to work for—and you figured out that the anonymous writer was someone right here in the Rookery, Thomasina Swallow. You went and confronted her and got your head cracked open for your trouble. And, fool that you are, you forgot who she calls ‘Papa.’”

  The way these things usually go, the perpetrator or the witness or whoever you’re grilling responds to their misdeeds being laid out for them by blustering or by getting angry or by clamming up. I figured Sedgewick was headed for blustering, but then something odd happened. His eyes clouded over, he picked up his pencil, and he started marking papers again. Then he set the pencil down, looked up, and said, “I was warned you might show up.”

  Cool Charles pecked my back right paw hard. “Let’s go,” he said. “Before this gets any weirder.”

  On the way out, I threw a glance back at Sedgewick. He circled a passage in blue, twirled his pencil, made a note in red. I wondered if he would remember we’d been there.

  * * *

  Charles let me try the lock twice before he plucked the paper clip away from me and opened the door in about three seconds. Crows, man.

  The Linguistics Department of the Rookery was small. There was a reception area with a secretary’s desk and a fixture consisting of open-fronted cubbies that served as mailboxes for the faculty and staff. Most of these were overflowing.

  “You check those mailboxes,” I said. “I’m going back to his office.”

  Behind the secretary’s desk was a warren of cubicles that were probably used by adjuncts, and then a corridor housing the more senior faculty’s offices. There was a hand-drawn diagram taped to the wall showing whose office was where, but I ignored it. I had Sedgewick’s scent. I followed my nose.

  His office door was unlocked. Superficially, the room resembled Thomasina Swallow’s office, except that there was a large casement window behind the desk and there were no stacks of files and papers. The room, in fact, was preternaturally neat.

  “Oh,” I said. “Of course. They’ve been here already.”

  Cool Charles burst into the room in full, panicked flight, nothing cool about him at all. He was closely pursued by a running woman dressed for the weather, with a scarf concealing her face. Not much of a disguise—even without the pince-nez I could smell my erstwhile client, Thomasina Swallow, PhD.

  Charles was cawing and cawing, loud. He was battering against the window, the ceiling, and the walls, all in turn. I suppressed the urge to bark. “What’s wrong?” I shouted instead. But Charles didn’t answer. “What did you do to him?” I asked the professor.

  “Thomasina,” came a voice from down at floor level. “The windows, if you would.”

  She rushed past me, sparing me a pitying look, and fumbled with the window latches. Charles fluttered about her hands, banging against the glass. I caught a glimpse of one of his eyes. The intelligence there was strange to me. Frightening. Animalistic.

  At last, the professor managed the latches and threw open the windows. As the cold and the snow came in, Cool Charles flew out, disappearing into the night.

  I stared after him. Then I turned, sniffing. “You killed him,” I said to Vicar Coleridge. “You as good as murdered him.”

  “He couldn’t be counted on to keep quiet,” said the learned mouse. “And he’s far from dead. He will no doubt live a happy life. Even mundane crows know more than they tell.”

  Thomasina Swallow drew a revolver out of her satchel. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that a professor of military history handled a weapon quite so competently, despite how frightened she seemed.

  “You got me involved in this,” I growled at her. “Why did you come to me in the first place if you were just going to help cover everything up?”

  I’d always known humans could shrug.

  “I didn’t have all the facts,” she said, voice trembling slightly. “Papa Coleridge was quite right. I panicked. I thought Sedgewick was going to expose me so I tried to kill him. I wasn’t aware that Papa knew about my research from the beginning, and that he’s been protecting me.”

  I measured the distance between me and the vicar, calculating whether I could cross it and swallow him whole before the professor could fire.

  “She’s quite a proficient shot,” said the mouse, leaning comfortably on his cane. “I wouldn’t try it.”

  “So what’s it going to be for me, then?” I asked. “A bullet or…” I nodded toward the still-open window. “Or that?”

  I didn’t know which would be worse. I didn’t imagine then that there could be something worse than either.

  “Oh, no, nothing of the sort for you, Mr. Marsh,” said the vicar. “You see, unlike the bird, we’re sure you can be quiet.”

  * * *

  And I have been.

  For the last eight years, I’ve never said a word about all that happened that day, not even when Henson came around to question me as part of the missing persons investigation they opened searching for Cool Charles. It’s never seemed worth it.

  Once, a long time before Charles went away, I thought I’d stumbled onto something big, something fundamental to the nature of our world. Then I discovered that other people had had similar revelations, that there was a whole subculture dedicated to rooting out what we thought of as the truth.

  It consumed me. It defined me. Ultimately, it destroyed me, costing me my career and most of my friendships.

  I have an old underground pamphlet here—the only one I have. It’s credited to A. Shrew, but I know its true authorship,
penned as it was by Thomasina Swallow, daughter of the learned mouse, Coleridge. It describes, in great detail, all the evidence supporting the contention that the supposed masters of this world and makers of most of us, human beings, are themselves, in their language-developing, tool-using current forms, the creations of an older and more alien race. The evidence is, to say the least, compelling.

  There have been many nights over the last eight years when I have almost fed it to the fire, along with all the notes I have accumulated on Professor Swallow’s career, on the sermons of Vicar Coleridge, on the behavior patterns of the common crow.

  Sometimes, I will be walking the streets and see a few crows perched high above. I imagine one of them is watching me. I can never tell from down here on the ground—is that one smaller than the others?

  I wonder.

  I will always wonder.

  About the Author

  Christopher Rowe has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His stories have been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review.

  Some of his stories are collected in Telling the Map, a 2017 publication from Small Beer Press. With his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond, he writes the Supernormal Sleuthing Service series of middle-grade novels for HarperCollins. Rowe and Bond live in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky with three rowdy dogs and one cool cat.

  Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Rowe

  Art copyright © 2019 by Armando Veve

  Blood is Another Word for Hunger

  Rivers Solomon

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  In a wooden house on a modest farmstead by a dense wood near a roving river to the west of town, miles from the wide road and far away from the peculiar madness that is men at war, lived the Missus, the Missus’s grown daughters Adelaide and Catherine, the Missus’s sister Bitsy, the Missus’s poorly mother Anna, and the Missus’s fifteen-year-old slave girl Sully, who had a heart made of teeth—for as soon as she heard word that Albert, the Missus’s husband, had been slain in battle, she took up arms against the family who’d raised her, slipping a tincture of valerian root and skullcap into their cups of warmed milk before slitting their throats in the night.

  The etherworld, always one eye steady on the realm of humankind, took note. Disturbances in the order of things could be exploited, could cut paths between dominions. The murder of a family by a girl so tender and young ripped a devilishly wide tunnel between the fields of existence, for it was not the way of things, and the etherworld thrived on the impermissible.

  Sully’s breaths blurred together into a whispery, chafed hum as she stood over the bodies. Blood marked her clothes, hair, and skin. She tasted it in her mouth, where it had shot in a stream from Bitsy’s artery. Her tongue, too, was coated, but Sully wouldn’t swallow. She couldn’t bear to have that hateful woman all up inside her body, slick and salty and merging with her own blood. Saliva gathered in her mouth till she had no choice but to spit on a patch of rug in the second bedroom, where Bitsy and the Missus’s daughter slept.

  She stumbled downstairs and out to the barn and grabbed the bar of soap from the metal tin that held all her possessions. Determined, she slaked it over her tongue before biting off a morsel and swallowing it, just in case a smidge of Bitsy had made its way into her and needed eradicating.

  Sully’s whistley, syncopated pants could’ve been the dying wheezes of a sick coyote or the first breaths of a colt, the battlesong of a screech owl, a storm wind. Sully closed her eyes. In the darkness and quiet of the barn, she could hear every night sound as loud as a woman hollering a field song. The music of it entered her, and she succumbed. When next Sully opened her eyes, she could breathe properly again. A few moments after that, she felt steady enough to return to the house.

  Sully gathered the blood-laden sheets from inside and carried them to the property’s stream, where the rush of water rinsed away the stains. She knew well how to untangle blood from cotton, having regularly scrubbed clean the Missus’s, the Missus’s daughter’s, and the Missus’s sister’s menses-soiled undergarments.

  When her fingers turned still from the mix of cool water and the brisk night wind, she carried the sheets to the tree and hung them over the naked branches. The beige linens blew back and forth in the wind, possessed. Sully went inside to warm her hands over the woodstove then carried the bodies of her slavers one by one over her shoulder outside. She dug a single grave for hours and hours and hours into the night, into the next day, and into that night, too, never sleeping, and filled the wound she’d made in the earth with Missus, Adelaide, Catherine, Bitsy, and Anna, and covered them with soil.

  Her heart should’ve ached for these women—they’d raised her from age six—but it did not. She was still seething, madder, in fact, than she’d been before the kill because her final act of rebellion had not brought the relief she’d imagined it would. These ladies who’d loomed Goliath in her life, who’d unleashed every ugliness they could think of on Sully, were corn husks now, souls hollowed out. Irrelevant. How could that be? How could folks so immense become nothing in the space of time it took a blade to swipe six inches?

  It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.

  Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.

  As she fell backwards to the ground, her belly turned giant and bulbous. She stared up at the crescent moon and spat at it for the way it mocked her with its half-smile. Sully hated that grinning white ghoul, and with all the spite at the fates she could muster, she howled and she howled and she howled at it. She howled until she became part wolf, a lush coat of gray fur spiking from her shoulder blades and spine. It was magic from the dead land that Ziza brought with her, where there was no border separating woman from beast.

  Hearing the pained wailing, Ziza made herself as small as possible as she felt herself being birthed, not wishing to damage her host. With her last ounce of etherworld magic, she shrunk herself down to the size of a large baby for the time it would take to come out.

  “Help,” moaned Sully, but she’d killed anyone who might be able to offer intervention. “Help me!” Sully’s womb contracted, and overwhelmed with the urge to push, she squeezed until that baby who was not a baby came out of her.

  Sully’s mouth hung agape as she watched the birthed-thing crawl from the cradle of her thighs then grow bigger, bigger, and bigger until it was full grown. It was a girl Sully’s age, and though she was not quite smiling, she was—Sully struggled to put a name to the stranger’s expression—impressed with the situation. “Lordy,” said Sully, but she was in too much pain to worry over this oddity. The skin betwixt her legs had suffered from the delivery, now inflamed. Her vulva felt like a broken bone.

/>   She tried to stand but was too weak, and the freshly bornt teenager offered a hand. Sully took it but shoved it away once she was up, then limped along to the kitchen where she fixed herself a poultice of mashed bread and soured milk. The smell of it turned her stomach and she vomited on the table before collapsing over a chair. Was this how it would end, in this dank kitchen, on this dank farmstead?

  Sully felt a hand on her back. “Ma’am?” the fresh-bornt teenager said. “My name’s Ziza. I’m going to take care of you,” she said. She had a small, squeaky voice that reminded Sully of a mouse. “Don’t you worry,” she said.

  Ziza pressed the bread-and-milk poultice to Sully’s vulva, fastening the mixture to her body with strips of cotton. She mashed herbs into a thick, leafy tea. “Drink this, girl,” she said, smiling with a joyful warmth that did not match the bloodiness of these hectic circumstances. “It’ll help along with the poultice.”

  Sully’s nose curled up at the scent of it. “You just raised me up from the dead, and now you’re telling me you can’t swallow a little of my brew?” asked Ziza.

  Lulled by Ziza’s gentle, chiding way, Sully obeyed—her first time ever to do so not under the threat of violence. “Shhh, now. Sleep,” said Ziza. She began to hum, but it wasn’t a lullaby sort of song. Too lively.

  “I’m not tired,” Sully insisted, but she couldn’t breathe through the pain between her legs and her words came out as a series of gasps. “Am I dying?”

  “You’re passing out,” said Ziza, stroking Sully’s face.

  “You an angel or something?” asked Sully.

  “Oh, I think you might be the angel. An avenging angel,” said Ziza.

  Sully hadn’t spoken to a soul besides her masters in years. She hated how heavy her eyelids felt, how much of a strain it was to keep them wide open. The limits of her body were robbing her of this moment, this bewildering, strange moment.