The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "This blood," the younger brother said, holding his cut hand so the blood dripped onto the king's face. "It is my father's, and I will avenge it." He drew another knife from his belt.

  "You are older than I am," the king said. "I do not know your father. Your grievance is with a dead man."

  "When you are dead," the younger brother said, "I will have no grievance." He planted one knee in the king's chest. His brother called his name.

  "Kill me, then," said the king. "But know that you redress no wrong. You kill as a mad dog kills, because you don't know what else to do."

  Perhaps the younger brother hesitated for a moment, or perhaps magic saw its opportunity and spoke through his elder sibling's mouth; but before the knife could fall the older brother said, "You will not be a mad dog, brother. You will not repay shame with shame."

  With those words, his life's one bit of magic whirlpooled from his body, and where a moment before the king had lain helpless under an assassin's knife, now the older brother watched as a small brown dog pawed at the king's tunic and strained to lick his chin.

  The king pushed the dog aside and with a disgusted noise jerked the knife from the broken links of his mail. "Did you know who I was?" he asked.

  The remaining brother, three knives in his two dangling hands, shook his head.

  "It is odd," the king said, and had to pause for breath. He struggled to his feet. "To thank a man who would turn his brother into a dog."

  "Odder yet to save the son of the man who killed my father," the older brother replied.

  The king looked from the older brother to the attentive dog, who limped ever so slightly on one front paw. "So," he said.

  "But I have seen men die, and few were able to face it as you did," the older brother went on. He began to gather up his props and gimmicks. "I thought I saw a kingly man in you." He tried to say something more, but he could not speak of what he had done.

  The dog sat in front of the king. His tail wagged against one of the fallen knives, and he started up at the clatter and ran a few steps before returning with tail and nose both low to the ground. "Take care of my brother," said the lone acrobat as he shouldered his pack. "I see he wishes to remain with you."

  "Why should I not kill him?"

  The acrobat looked the king in the eye. "Your grievance is not with a dog."

  Dawn broke on the castle's highest towers.

  "True," said the king. "Very well, he will remain with me. As will you. I will have you and your brother at my throne, one to remind me of how close to death I came, and the other to remind me of why I was allowed to live. Walk with me, king's jester."

  All of this was bad enough; but then the jester fell in love with the queen.

  He remembered the moment of falling in love like a story told by someone else. The great stones of the hall outside the throne room, pale gray except streaks on either side, where generations of the royal wolfhounds had rubbed their ears along the grooves and ridges in the ancient stones. This king, whose life the jester had saved, was the first in memory to keep a limping brown dog of anonymous pedigree instead of the great loping hounds named for stars and mythical ancestors.

  Passing her in the hall: she taller by a head and younger by two generations, he favoring a heel bruised earlier that day tumbling for an ambassador. She with hair the color of the old streaks in the walls, a brown almost black, and eyes the color of the untouched stones, the gray of a cloud heavy with lightning; he with a balding head and knuckles swollen by winter's chill. The jester became exalted in that moment, realizing that she was the castle, she was the kingdom, it was the twin example of her kindness and her iron rectitude that made it possible for the king to spare the jester's brother. He loved her because she seemed in that moment to him like an ideal given flesh, an ideal for which the sacrifice of a brother was not too great. Foolish, yes, and sentimental: but as good an explanation as any.

  It haunted the jester that he had been willing to kill his brother. And he had; only the fickleness of magic had sped his mouth and stayed his hand. He found some small comfort in the royal heir's person, his utter lack of resemblance to his father. The old king had been capricious, vindictive, wanton in both kindness and cruelty. His successor remained scrupulous and fair, even generous. Around him the kingdom prospered without war.

  And I didn't kill my brother, the jester thought. I saved him. I protected him, as an older brother must.

  The king's dog was old now, gray around the muzzle and lame in his hind legs. A superstition arose that the king would live only as long as his dog (no one said this about the jester), and although the king knew better, still he protected the dog's life as jealously as his own, lest its death provoke unrest in the kingdom. The irony of this kept the jester in fine form for the mordant humor expected of him at court.

  What would happen, he wondered, if the king were actually persuaded to foist him off on some rustic baron? Sooner or later, wouldn't the story of the dog his brother leak between the royal lips? And wouldn't the queen . . .? The duty of her heart was to her husband, and of her mind to her king. She would have the dog killed out of a kind of loathing mercy, pitying the beast its lost humanity even as she ordered it drowned to ensure that no entombed memory would resurface and tear out the throat of the sleeping king.

  Having once thought this, the jester grew certain events could play out no other way, just as having once seen the queen as his own ideals bodied forth, he could never rid himself of his passion for her. Exaltation fled him. "Why must I love her?" he demanded of the sky, but the clouds of course took on the color of her eyes and kept their peace. Love twisted inside him the way magic had on its way from his body, anguish and ecstasy. Loving the queen who would kill his brother, the jester could only think of her implacable magnificence, her mind like light in cold water.

  It was afternoon. The jester left the lake, went back to the city and the castle, and the next day the queen mentioned it again. Wouldn't the old jester be happier away from the trials and pressures of court? she asked, slipping through the fissure in his field of vision, and the jester knew what he had to do.

  The spell broker kept himself secret, but the jester knew where to find him in the twilit side of the city. "My magic is gone," the jester said.

  "Else why would you be here?" the broker said, and displayed brown teeth in a round white face shaved smooth as an egg. "Let me look at you."

  The jester kept himself still as the spell broker plucked a strand of his hair and burned it over a candle, traced the outline of his ribs, smelled his breath, looked into his eyes and ears. "What is it you want?" the broker said upon finishing his inspection.

  "The safety of my brother." The jester had heard stories about the deviousness of the spell broker. It was best not to be too specific too soon.

  "Safety. Magic cannot guarantee safety. Magic can sometimes kill a threat, perhaps redirect it. Forgetting-magic is the easiest, though, and the surest."

  She could forget, the jester thought. It made him inexplicably sad, though, the idea of court whispers: The queen, forget? She of the searchlight mind and unshakable will, the gray eyes like stones that held within them memories of each and every soul who passed by?

  I will protect my brother.

  "Forgetting magic, yes," the jester said. "If it is the easiest, it must come cheaply."

  "The cheapest magic comes dear," said the broker.

  "Name your price."

  "Your eye."

  "Very well," the jester said, and in a sudden panic thought too soon, spoke too soon, because the broker was still speaking, and the words out of his mouth were, "Your left eye."

  My good eye, the jester thought. How will I look on the queen?

  But his mouth was already open saying yes.

  He found he could look upon the queen, after a fashion. If he positioned himself correctly, she would, on her way to kiss the king, walk through the part of his world that had not faded to a lifeless fog. He could not see her clear
ly, only well enough to remember how she had once appeared to him.

  Well enough.

  I did this for you, he would whisper sometimes under his breath. So you would not feel betrayed when you discovered what I have done for my brother.

  In the jester's thirty-seventh year, when the dog his brother was thirty-three, the king had retired him from acrobatics, and the jester passed his days in excremental assaults on courtiers even as he kept his head turned slightly away to the left of the queen. The court thought him blind in the right eye instead of the left, and grudgingly credited him for his seemly deference to the queen's presence. They imagined that this deference arose out of gratitude at being permitted to remain at court, and the queen's stature increased among the aristocratic gossips, her reputation for kindness burnishing the well-known brilliance of her mind and the much-praised symmetry of her face. She often stooped to pet the old dog, who would thump his tail against the leg of the throne at her approach.

  The jester kept his secrets, and he was careful around the children. The broker's spell made no guarantee against the queen's remembering. If he pitied himself from time to time, he ran his fingers where the queen's had been, along the dog his brother's neck, and he said to himself, unable to stop: One lives in one's world, he said to the sleeping dog. One lives in one's world.

  4

  The boy still slept. But Will had come in from outside. "You're not blind," he said.

  "I'm not a dog, either," Paulus said. He set Will's copy of the Book aside.

  Will lit his pipe. "Twice someone spent their magic on you?"

  "Aye," Paulus said. "Twice."

  "And how did the second come about?"

  "You wouldn't believe me," Paulus said.

  "Already I don't believe you," Will said. "Tell another one."

  "My brother confessed to the queen and as a reward for the laughter he had brought to the court, she bought me back my shape as a man, on the condition that I enter the king's service. I fought eleven years in the king's wars, and then he sent me to kill the dragon. When I came back, my brother and the king had both died, and I was released. Since then I have been for hire."

  Will blew smoke rings over the sleeping boy. "All of this after you tried to kill the king? Ha," he said. "I wish that was true. No, I don't."

  Three times, actually, Paulus thought. The forgetting he'd bought four years ago in The Fells was the third. Paulus made an occasional pastime of imagining who that little bit of magic had come from: a gambler needing to cover a debt, a soldier wanting a woman, a merchant whose cargo had foundered in the straits. Perhaps even the woman who had borne this child who might be his. The brokers of The Fells moved through the hamlets and farms of the mountains, following the lucrative scents of poverty and desperation. Their prices weren't fair, but even a rapacious deal often made the difference between feeding children and selling them.

  "Three years ago?" he asked.

  "Four, in the fall."

  "How?"

  Will shrugged. "She was bringing water. Sat down for a rest beside the path, I guess, and I found her when I heard the boy crying. Maybe six months old, he was."

  Could be, Paulus thought. The sleeping boy was curled on his side, arms drawn in under his chin, still shadowed from the sunlight falling through the hut's single window. Firelight glowed in the tangles of his hair. Paulus thought he might see something of himself in the shape of the boy's shoulders, the line of his jaw.

  Today I must kill Myros, he thought. Because if I do not, I will have to kill this boy, and I cannot.

  "Have you named him? Had she?"

  "She called him after you," Will said. "So I did, too."

  Paulus was brimful and shattering. A boy with my name, he thought. After all this, all the leavings and the years with no place to call my own, in my fiftieth year I ride out on a mission of killing and find a boy with my name.

  It was written in the Book: Let the Lesson be.

  He stood, and his knees cracked. "Today this ends," Paulus said. "One way or another. If the boy asks for me, tell him I will return by nightfall or not at all."

  The boy. Still, Paulus admonished himself, you cannot call him by his name?

  He walked the final steps of his Agate Tower errand, his body leading him to the dragon's cave as if his scars were lines on a map. It would have taken Myros some time to prepare the spell to control the dragon, and more time yet for him to gather his courage and enter the cave when the dragon did not come out. Quite a string of surprises Myros was in for, Paulus thought, and bared his teeth as he wound up a switchbacking footpath that ended on the ridge above the cave. He made no effort to disguise his presence. If Myros had already spent his energy on the spell, then he was just another baby turtle; if he had not, Paulus was in for a hard fight, but on this day he would kill no man from behind. He crested the ridge and closed his eyes, riding out a wave of memories. The cave mouth, like a half-lidded eye, was the same, yet it seemed smaller to him; the smell of the snow on the north side of the ridge made him think of ice storms rattling against a window with a sound like the rasp of the dragon's scales.

  They were all before him now, the specters of those gone from his life: his brother, Andrew, his mother, the king. Men he had served with. Joy. And the boy she had named for him.

  When Paulus opened his eyes, Myros was looking at him from the cave entrance. "For this you made me kill children," Paulus said.

  "I made you do nothing," Myros said, and made a gesture with his ringed hand.

  Paulus was alight with pain: every blade that had ever cut him cut him anew. He felt the teeth of dogs and the dragon's talons, the piercing of an arrow and the grate of a spearpoint across his skull. Thumbs gouged at his eyes, and bootheels ground his fingers. He dropped his sword and felt his knees buckle. Blood roared in his ears, and somewhere beyond it he heard Myros' footsteps on the stones of the trail. Looking up through tears, he saw the apprentice coming nearer. You misjudge me, Paulus thought, and drank of his pain until it had given him strength to stand, and when he had gotten to his feet he left his sword where it lay and fell upon Myros with bare hands.

  When it was done, he lay gasping on the stony ground as the apprentice's spell slowly faded from his body. He felt as if he was being knit together again, and when the pain had faded into the leaden dullness that for Paulus always followed killing, he got to his feet. Leaving his sword where it lay, he walked a short distance into the cave, to the point where the light from without finally failed. Trailing away into the dark, the bones of the dragon had already begun taking on the color of the stones around them.

  One more, Paulus remembered thinking. I was right, and I was wrong.

  It was afternoon when he returned to Will's farm. The boy was on his hands and knees following an insect through the beaten grass. He looked up at Paulus' approach and stood. "There's a beetle there," he said.

  Paulus knew in that moment how little he understood of children, and how enormous his task was. "Your name is Paulus. Is that right?" he asked.

  The boy nodded, but his attention was already wandering back to the beetle. He parted the grasses looking for it.

  "My name is Paulus too."

  The boy looked over his shoulder at Paulus. Where, Paulus wondered? A place without wizards. A place without these bargains driven for your soul. A place where my boy will not follow my path. He realized he had forgotten his sword, and resolved that he would never wear another. Let the Lesson be.

  "You're going to come with me," Paulus said.

  And the boy said, "Where are we going?"

  The Cambist and Lord Iron:

  A Fairy Tale of Economics

  Daniel Abraham

  Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com) sold his first short story in 1996, and followed it with three novels, including the first two volumes in fantasy series "The Long Price Quartet," and more than twenty short stories, including International Horror Guild Award winner "Flat Diane." His most recent books are Hunter's Ru
n (an SF novel written with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) and A Betrayal in Winter. Upcoming are new novels An Autumn War and The Price of Spring.

  A cambist is an expert on exchange rates. In the dark fantasy that follows, written for John Klima's excellent anthology Logorrhea, a mild-mannered cambist is called on to weigh and assess the comparative value of much more than two different currencies.

  For as many years as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every morning, he could be seen making the trek from his rooms in the boarding house on State Street, down past the street vendors with their apples and cheese, and into the bowels of the underground railway only to emerge at the station across the wide boulevard from Magdalen Gate. Some mornings he would pause at the tobacconist's or the newsstand before entering the hallowed hall of the postal authority, but seven o'clock found him without fail at the ticker tape checking for the most recent exchange rates. At half past, he was invariably updating the slate board with a bit of chalk. And with the last chime of eight o'clock, he would nod his respect to his small portrait of His Majesty, King Walther IV, pull open the shutters, and greet whatever traveler had need of him.

  From that moment until the lunch hour and again from one o'clock until six, Olaf lived and breathed the exchange of foreign currencies. Under his practiced hands, dollars became pounds sterling; rubles became marks; pesos, kroner; yen, francs. Whatever exotic combination was called for, Olaf arranged with a smile, a kind word, and a question about the countries which minted the currencies he passed under the barred window. Over years, he had built nations in his mind; continents. Every country that existed, he could name, along with its particular flavor of money, its great sights and monuments, its national cuisine.