The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  “That’s Klam,” whispered the Little Girl. “He’s a crazy person.”

  Creature touched the man’s mind, and recoiled. It was all brambles and barbed wire, and it hurt him just to look at it. He said: “I mean you no harm, sir. I am merely escorting this young lady to her mother.”

  “The harlot has no place in this House of God,” said Klam.

  This made Creature angry, and the anger frightened him. It was an ugly and bitter and terrible thing. And so he pressed it into the bowels of his mind, and said: “Please do not speak ill of the child. She has harmed no one.”

  “Her existence,” said Klam, “harms us all.”

  “Remove yourself from our path, sir,” said Creature, his patience suddenly spent. “Do so immediately.”

  “I do not fear you, Demon. You cannot hurt me.”

  “I can hurt you in ways that you cannot possibly imagine,” said the anger, before Creature could stop it. “I can make you long for mere agony.”

  And then Klam reached behind him, and drew a shotgun from its holster, and fired.

  Creature reacted quickly, bristling into a sudden forest of pseudopods. The onrushing cloud of metal would not harm him, of course, but the Little Girl was only flesh and sinew, delicate and frangible. His lashed out with his extrusions, moving faster than thought, catching the bullets, redirecting them into the central mass of his body.

  All but one.

  He felt it slip between his fingers and pass over his summit, saw it pierce the flesh of the girl’s arm. Heard her scream. Felt her pain as his own.

  And then, while he was not looking, the anger rose.

  He softened his midsection and moved forward and subsumed Klam into his body and then walled him off into a small compartment, and then shrank the compartment into a box the size of a coffin, and then shrank it again, and again, breaking Klam in steady stages. There was a time when he would have prolonged Klam’s death, savoring his screams, but that time was past. He crushed him quickly, and heard his thoughts wink out.

  The Little Girl was crying, quietly. He lowered her to the ground and examined her wound. The bullet had nibbled at the edge of her shoulder, but had not entered. He pressed himself against it, to stanch the flow of blood, and said: “All is well, Little Girl.”

  They were alone now, all the bridge’s denizens having retreated to their shacks. “Come,” said Creature. “Let us continue.” He took the Little Girl’s hand, and they moved through the silence.

  After some time, the girl pointed, and whispered: “That’s where we lived.”

  Creature turned his gaze to a collapsed structure of wood and canvas, and then liquified and flowed into it. He found torn shreds of paper, a tattered rug, a toothless comb, scraps of clothing, an empty frame affixed to the canvas; nothing more. He came out again, and said: “There is no one here.”

  “Oh,” said the Little Girl.

  “Do you remember where you last saw your mother?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and turned toward the bridge’s summit. Creature followed in her wake. “She woke up really early yesterday,” said the Little Girl, “and went outside. She was trying to be quiet, but I heard her so I got up too, and then I followed her.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yeah,” said the Little Girl, and stopped at the edge of the bridge, where it fell away into the brown roil of the river Sludge. “She came here. I thought she was maybe waiting for someone, so I waited too, hiding behind Mr. Bickle’s house.” She pointed at a ramshackle hut behind her. “But she just stood there for a long time, and no one else came, and then she looked back at our house and then she jumped in the river.”

  Creature was silent for some time. He said: “I see.”

  “I waited here for a while, and then I went down off the bridge to the river and looked for her. But she wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to come back up here on my own.”

  “Of course.”

  “So I just started walking.” She looked up, toward Creature’s summit. “And I found you.”

  Creature stared at the river. Flotillas of muck and jetsam flowed along, teams of wreckage, bobbing and sinking. He said: “Well.” In truth, he did not know what to say. The Little Girl affected him in ways he did not understand.

  There was a stir behind them, then, small bits of sound running together: curtains drawn aside, shuffling feet, stage whispers. He turned, and saw them: the people of the bridge, massing.

  They stood tremulous and resolute and afraid, clasping the detritus of their lives in the hands: long boards with nails hammered into their ends, filed metal rods, rusting butcher knives, ancient firearms. It was a sad and ragtag gathering, and, examining it, Creature could muster nothing more than pity. Not even the anger would rouse itself for this dim spectacle.

  A man stepped forward. He was dressed in scraps and tatters, and the left side of his face twitched with a flickering palsy. He said: “We don’t want you here, Monster.”

  He could have killed them all, of course. He could have crushed them against one other, plunged through their mouths into their bodies and eaten them from the inside, broken the ground at their feet and sent them hurtling into the river. Instead, he moved to the edge of the bridge, beside the Little Girl, and said: “It is time for us to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Someplace that is not here.” He folded himself into a broad sickle-moon concavity. “Come into me.”

  She paused, then stepped onto his body.

  “It will be very dark for a while, Little Girl. Do not be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said, and lay down.

  And so Creature shaped himself a hollow globe, sealing the Little Girl inside of him, and rolled over the edge of the bridge.

  The brown surface of the river rose to meet him, and he fell into its murk with a great crash, sending up a high torrent of muddy water. They sank slowly into its depths, where the darkness was absolute, and let the current draw them downriver.

  When he sensed that the air trapped inside of him was growing scarce, he rose to the surface of the river, unfolding like an opening hand, and fashioned himself into a raft. The Little Girl lay asleep in its center, curled into a tiny ball. He raised a portion of himself into a pillow, and arched a blanket of himself over her body. And they floated thus through the city, with the darkness gathering steadily about them.

  * * *

  —

  The Little Girl awoke at dawn, just as the sun was heaving itself over the horizon, a pale shapeless luminescence in the gray soup of cloud. She stretched, and looked around.

  “Sir?” she said.

  “I am here, Little Girl,” said Creature.

  “What happened to the city?”

  “We have left it.”

  They were floating through the wasteland now, across a dead plain still scarred with the ravages of the last war: trench furrows had been torn out of the earth, as if by great scythes, and many of the trees were burned stumps, or leafless and shattered skeletons. The air was thick with heat and heavy with moisture. The girl mopped sweat off her brow and surveyed the river. Tourette crabs on either bank followed their progress, spewing unbroken streams of profanity. Jellyfowl floated above them in the soft eddies of breeze, trailing curtains of barbed streamers. A troupe of the soulless trudged the banks, following the scent of life.

  The girl lay down and said: “I’ve never been outside the city.”

  “The waste is no safe place for little girls.”

  “Is this your home?”

  Creature paused. He had never thought of it as home. “It is where I live, yes.”

  “Aren’t you afraid all alone out here?”

  “Not in the way you mean,” he said. He had never feared the wasteland, really. But he did not wish to become one of its thoughtless, feral denizens. That, he fea
red.

  She lapsed back into silence, and Creature reached into her mind, and found only sadness. He said: “Do you want to go back to the city, Little Girl?”

  She shook her head, not lifting it off his surface. He saw that this was both true, and false. She despised the city, but it was the only home she’d ever known. An intractable dilemma.

  Creature prepared a bolus of happiness, the largest he could fashion, and filled it with bright sunlight and green fields, fairytale princesses and caring mothers and endless summers.

  The Little Girl said: “Sir?”

  “Yes, Little Girl.”

  “I wish you’d come before. You’re nice, like Mr. Bickle. I think Mommy would have let you take care of me. And then maybe she wouldn’t have gone away.”

  Again, Creature found himself without words. They floated on in silence.

  “I heard her talking to Mr. Bickle once, when she thought I was asleep. She said I made her old. She said that worrying about me all the time was killing her.”

  “Even mothers say things they do not mean, sometimes,” said Creature, maneuvering himself around a whirling funnel of piranha clownfish.

  “Do you have a mother?”

  “I did, yes. She left me a long time ago.”

  “What was she like?”

  Creature did not answer at once. He had two mothers, really: the one he had inhabited for nine months, who’d borne him and then died; and the gentle woman who inhabited him, the light that led him out of his bestiality, that banished his darkness. In many ways, he was glad that he had never known the real mother; it left him free to manufacture the unconditional love of the false one.

  “I wish I could tell you, Little Girl. I do not know. But I do know that she watches over me still, and protects me.”

  The Little Girl turned onto her back, and looked up at the sky. “Your Mommy sounds nice too.”

  Creature held the bolus of happiness at the threshold on her consciousness, but did not insert it. Its effect would be temporary, and false, an ice sculpture in the desert.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Little Girl.”

  “Who’s going to take care of me now?”

  “I do not know. Do you have any uncles or aunts?”

  She shook her head.

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  She shook her head.

  “Grandparents?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then perhaps,” he said, almost shyly, “you should stay with me. Until you are old enough to take care of yourself.”

  “Out here?”

  “Yes. It’s not so bad, really, once you’ve grown accustomed to it. Let me show you.”

  The soulless were well behind them, and the crabs had given up the chase. Creature drifted toward the bank, then rose out of the river as an obelisk, lengthening as he went, thrusting the Little Girl high above the skeletal trees. She squealed, first in fright, then in delight. He extruded eight legs from his base and skittered onto the bank, a tall spider column swaying gently in the freshening breeze.

  “I can see everything!” cried the Little Girl. “I can see the city and the hills and the river and everything!”

  They walked on. A clod of scuttle earth, the size and shape of a mattress, rose from the ground and shambled out of their path, raining worms from its underside; in the distance, two clouds of semaphore ravens spoke in shifting patterns; a herd of wild rats stampeded across a faraway bramble meadow; a flotilla of sailfish navigated the deeps of the distant oxblood lake.

  The Little Girl watched with widening eyes. “This place is weird.”

  “No stranger than your city, Little Girl. The strangeness differs only in its particulars.”

  “Where’s your house?”

  “There is no house.” Silence. He lifted the impression of a face onto the flat surface of his summit, and looked at the Little Girl. “Although we could build one. A large house, if you like, with many rooms.”

  Her expression was composed, and very serious. She was, suddenly, far older than her years. “Can you let me down, Sir?”

  “Certainly.” He shrank into a disk the size of a manhole cover, and, when the girl stepped off, rose into his cauldron shape. “Are you hungry?”

  She shrugged, and said: “Sir?”

  “Yes, Little Girl.”

  “Is my Mommy dead?”

  Creature paused. He said: “Yes. I fear that she is.”

  The girl was silent for a moment. She said: “I wish she wasn’t.”

  Creature had nothing to say to this. They stood in silence, listening to the wind rattle the skeletal branches of the trees, the river lap lazily against its banks.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Little Girl.”

  “My name’s Melanie. You can call me Melanie.”

  He hesitated, and felt the dim stirrings of something unfamiliar in his mind: fear, perhaps, or hope, or dread, or joy. Or none of these things. Or all of them. He said: “Melanie,” and extruded an arm, and took her hand. And together they watched the flocks of semaphore ravens converge on the horizon, signaling frantically to one another across the gulf of sky.

  Garth Nix (1963– ) is an Australian writer who is best known for his many books for children and young adults. Before becoming a full-time writer in 2001, he worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, bookseller, and part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe” first appeared in Fast Ships, Black Sails edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (2008). It is one of Nix’s series of stories about Sir Hereward (a world-weary knight) and Mister Fitz (a sorcerer who happens to be a living puppet with a giant papier-mâché head), Agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World, whose mission is to seek out and destroy malicious gods or godlets. The story was collected with two others in Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz (2013); Nix’s other short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall (2005), One Beastly Beast, Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales (2007), and To Hold the Bridge (2015).

  BEYOND THE SEA GATE OF THE SCHOLAR-PIRATES OF SARSKÖE

  Garth Nix

  “REMIND ME WHY the pirates won’t sink us with cannon fire at long range,” said Sir Hereward as he lazed back against the bow of the skiff, his scarlet-sleeved arms trailing far enough over the side to get his twice folded-back cuffs and hands completely drenched, with occasional splashes going down his neck and back as well. He enjoyed the sensation, for the water in these eastern seas was warm, the swell gentle, and the boat was making a good four or five knots, reaching on a twelve knot breeze.

  “For the first part, this skiff formerly belonged to Annim Tel, the pirate’s agent in Kerebad,” said Mister Fitz. Despite being only three feet six and a half inches tall and currently lacking even the extra height afforded by his favourite hat, the puppet was easily handling both tiller and main sheet of their small craft. “For the second part, we are both clad in red, the colour favoured by the pirates of this archipelagic trail, so they will account us as brethren until proven otherwise. For the third part, any decent perspective glass will bring close to their view the chest that lies lashed on the thwart there, and they will want to examine it, rather than blow it to smithereens.”

  “Unless they’re drunk, which is highly probable,” said Hereward cheerfully. He lifted his arms out of the water and shook his hands, being careful not to wet the tarred canvas bag at his feet that held his small armoury. Given the mission at hand, he had not brought any of his usual, highly identifiable weapons. Instead the bag held a mere four snaphance pistols of quite ordinary though serviceable make, an oiled leather bag of powder, a box of shot, and a blued steel main gauche in a sharkskin scabbard. A sheathed mortuary sword lay across the top of the bag, its half-basket hilt at Hereward’s feet.


  He had left his armour behind at the inn where they had met the messenger from the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World and though he was currently enjoying the light air upon his skin, and was optimistic by nature, Hereward couldn’t help reflect that a scarlet shirt, leather breeches and sea boots were not going to be much protection if the drunken pirates aboard the xebec they were sailing towards chose to conduct some musketry exercise.

  Not that any amount of leather and proof steel would help if they happened to hit the chest. Even Mister Fitz’s sorcery could not help them in that circumstance, though he might be able to employ some sorcery to deflect bullets or small shot from both boat and chest.

  Mister Fitz looked, and was currently dressed in the puffy-trousered raiment of one of the self-willed puppets that were made long ago in a gentler age to play merry tunes, declaim epic poetry and generally entertain. This belied his true nature and most people or other beings who encountered the puppet other than casually did not find him entertaining at all. While his full sewing desk was back at the inn with Hereward’s gear, the puppet still had several esoteric needles concealed under the red bandanna that was tightly strapped on his pumpkin-sized papier mâché head, and he was possibly one of the greatest practitioners of his chosen art still to walk—or sail—the known world.

  “We’re in range of the bow-chasers,” noted Hereward. Casually, he rolled over to lie on his stomach, so only his head was visible over the bow. “Keep her head on.”

  “I have enumerated three excellent reasons why they will not fire upon us,” said Mister Fitz, but he pulled the tiller a little and let out the main sheet, the skiff’s sails billowing as it ran with the wind, so that it would bear down directly on the bow of the anchored xebec, allowing the pirates no opportunity for a full broadside. “In any case, the bow-chasers are not even manned.”

  Hereward squinted. Without his artillery glass he couldn’t clearly see what was occurring on deck, but he trusted Fitz’s superior vision.