The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year)

by Jonathan Strahan

  The third was the Mechanical Soldier, who manifested as a suit of armor inside which lights blinked on-off, on-off, in digital splendor. Seran was buying more wine – you could usually get your hands on some, even during the occupation, if your standards were low – when he heard the clink-clank thunder outside the dim room where the transaction was taking place. The Mechanical Soldier carried a black sword, which proved capable of cutting through metal and crystal and stone. With great precision it carved a window in the wall. The blinking lights brightened as it regarded Seran.

  The wine-seller shrieked and dropped one of the bottles, to Seran's dismay. The air was pungent with the wine's sour smell. Seran looked unflinchingly at the helmet, although a certain amount of flinching was undoubtedly called for, and after a while the Mechanical Soldier went away in search of its real target.

  It turned out that the Mechanical Soldier liked to carve cartouches into walls, or perhaps its coat-of-arms. Whenever it struck down Jaian's soldiers, lights sparked in the carvings, like sourceless eyes. People began leaving offerings by the carvings: oil-of-massacres, bouquets of crystals with fissures in their shining hearts, cardamom bread. (Why cardamom, Seran wasn't sure. At least the aroma was pleasing.) Jaian's soldiers executed people they caught at these makeshift shrines, but the offerings kept coming.

  Seran had laid in a good supply of wine, but after the Mechanical Soldier shuddered apart into pixels and blackened reticulations, there was a maddening period of calm. He waited for the warden's summons.

  No summons came.

  Jaian's soldiers swaggered through the streets again, convinced that there would be no more apparitions. The city's people whispered to each other that they must have faith. The offerings increased in number.

  Finding wine became too difficult, so Seran gave it up. He was beginning to think that he had dreamed up the whole endeavor when the effigy nights started again.

  Imulai Mokarengen suddenly became so crowded with effigies that Seran's othersight of fire and smoke was not much different from reality. He had not known that the city contained so many stories: women with deadly hands and men who sang atrocity-hymns. Colonial intelligences that wove webs across the pitted buildings and flung disease-sparks at the invaders. A cannon that rose up out of the city's central plaza and roared forth red storms.

  But Jaian of the Burning Orb wasn't a fool. She knew that the effigies, for all their destructiveness, burned out eventually. She and her soldiers retreated beneath their force-domes and waited.

  Seran resolved to do some research. How did the warden mean to win her war, if she hadn't yet managed it?

  By now he had figured out that the effigies would not harm him, although he still had the scar the Saint of Guns had given him. It would have been easy to remove the scar, but he was seized by the belief that the scar was his protection.

  He went first to a bookstore in which candles burned and cogs whirred. Each candle had the face of a child. A man with pale eyes sat in an unassuming metal chair, shuffling cards. "I thought you were coming today," he said.

  Seran's doubts about fortune-telling clearly showed on his face. The man laughed and fanned out the cards face-up. Every one of them was blank. "I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said, "but they only tell you what you already know."

  "I need a book about the Saint of Guns," Seran said. She had been the first. No reason not to start at the beginning.

  "That's not a story I know," the man said. His eyes were bemused. "I have a lot of books, if you want to call them that, but they're really empty old journals. People like them for the papers, the bindings. There's nothing written in them."

  "I think I have what I came for," Seran said, hiding his alarm. "I'm sorry to trouble you."

  He visited every bookstore in the district, and some outside of it, and his eyes ached abominably by the end. It was the same story at all of them. But he knew where he had to go next.

  Getting into the South Archive meant hiring a thief-errant, whose name was Izeut. Izeut had blinded Seran for the journey, and it was only now, inside one of the reading rooms, that Seran recovered his vision. He suspected he was happier not knowing how they had gotten in. His stomach still felt as though he'd tied it up in knots.

  Seran had had no idea what the Archive would look like inside. He had especially not expected the room they had landed in to be welcoming, the kind of place where you could curl up and read a few novels while sipping citron tea. There were couches with pillows, and padded chairs, and the paintings on the walls showed lizards at play.

  "All right," Izeut said. His voice was disapproving, but Seran had almost beggared himself paying him, so the disapproval was very faint. "What now?"

  "All the books look like they're in place here," Seran said. "I want to make sure there's nothing obviously missing."

  "That will take a while," Izeut said. "We'd better get started."

  Not all the rooms were welcoming. Seran's least favorite was the one in which sickles hung from the ceiling, their tips gleaming viscously. But all the bookcases were full.

  Seran still wasn't satisfied. "I want to look inside a few of the books," he said.

  Izeut shot him a startled glance. "The city's traditions –"

  "The city's traditions are already dying," Seran said.

  "The occupation is temporary," Izeut said stoutly. "We just have to do more to drive out the warlord's people.

  Izeut had no idea. "Humor me," Seran said. "Haven't you always wanted to see what's in those books?" Maybe an appeal to curiosity would work better.

  Whether it did or not, Izeut stood silently while Seran pulled one of the books off the shelves. He hesitated, then broke the book's seal and felt the warden's black kiss, cold, unsentimental, against his lips. I'm already cursed, he thought, and opened the covers.

  The first few pages were fine, written in a neat hand with graceful swells. Seran flipped to the middle, however, and his breath caught. The pages were empty except for a faint dust-trace of distorted graphemes and pixellated stick figures.

  He could have opened up more books to check, but he had already found his answer.

  "Stop," Izeut said sharply. "Let me reshelve that." He took the book from Seran, very tenderly.

  "It's no use," Seran said.

  Izeut didn't turn around; he was slipping the book into its place. "We can go now."

  It was too late. The general's soldiers had caught them.

  Seran was separated from Izeut and brought before Jaian of the Burning Orb. She regarded him with cool exasperation. "There were two of you," she said, "but something tells me that you're the one I should worry about."

  She kicked the table next to her. All of Seran's surgical tools, which the soldiers had confiscated and laid out in disarray, clattered.

  "I have nothing to say to you," Seran said through his teeth.

  "Really," Jaian said. "You fancy yourself a patriot, then. We may disagree about the petty legal question of who the owner of this city is, but if you are any kind of healer, you ought to agree with me that these constant spasms of destruction are good for no one."

  "You could always leave," Seran said.

  She picked up one of his sets of tweezers and clicked it once, twice. "You will not understand this," she said, "and it is even right that you will not understand this, but I will try to explain. This is what I do. Worlds are made to be pressed for their wine, cities taste of fruit when I bite them open. Do you think I am ignorant of the source of the apparitions that leave their smoking shadows in the streets? You're running out of writings. All I need do is wait, and this city will yield in truth."

  "You're right," Seran said. "I don't understand you at all."

  Jaian's smile was like knives and nightfall. "I'll write this in a language you do understand, then. You know something about how this is happening, who's doing it. Take me to them or I will start killing your people in earnest. Every hour you make me wait, I'll drop a bomb, or send out tanks, or soldiers with gun
s. If I get bored I'll get creative."

  Seran closed his eyes and made himself breathe evenly. He didn't think she was bluffing. Besides, there was a chance – if only a small chance – that the warden could come up with a defense against the general; that the effigies would come to her aid once the general came within reach.

  "All right," he said. "I'll take you where it began."

  Seran was bound with chains-of-suffocation, and he thought it likely that there were more soldiers watching him than he could actually spot. He led Jaian to the secret library, to the maze-of-mists.

  "A warden," Jaian said. "I knew some of them had escaped."

  They went to the staircase and descended slowly, slowly. The candlesprites flinched from the general. Their light was almost violet, like dusk.

  All the way down the stairs they heard the snick-snick of many scissors.

  The downstairs room, when they reached it, was filled with paper. Curling scraps and triangles crowded the floor. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing some. The crumpling sound put Seran in mind of burnt skin.

  Come to that, there was something of that smell in the room, too.

  All through the room there were scissors snapping at empty space, wielded by no hand but the hands of the air, shining and precise.

  At the far end of the room, behind a table piled high with more paper scraps, was the warden. She was standing sideways, leaning heavily against the table, and her face was averted so that her shoulder-length hair fell around it.

  "It's over," Jaian called out. "You may as well surrender. It's folly to let you live, but your death doesn't have to be one of the ugly ones."

  Seran frowned. Something was wrong with the way the warden was moving, more like paper fluttering than someone breathing. But he kept silent. A trap, he thought, let it be a trap.

  Jaian's soldiers attempted to clear a path through the scissors, but the scissors flew to either side, avoiding the force-bolts with uncanny grace.

  Jaian's long strides took her across the room and around the table. She tipped the warden's face up, forced eye contact. If there had been eyes.

  Seran started, felt the chains-of-suffocation clot the breath in his throat. At first he took the marks all over the warden's skin to be tattoos. Then he saw that they were holes cut into the skin, charred black at the edges. Some of the marks were logographs, and alphabet letters, and punctuation stretched wide.

  "Stars and fire ascending," Jaian breathed, "what is this?"

  Too late she backed away. There was a rustling sound, and the warden unfurled, splitting down the middle with a jagged tearing sound, a great irregular sheet punched full of word-holes, completely hollowed out. Her robe crumpled into fine sediment, revealing the cutout in her back in the shape of a serpent-headed youth.

  Jaian made a terrible crackling sound, like paper being ripped out of a book. She took one step back toward Seran, then halted. Holes were forming on her face and hands. The scissors closed in on her.

  I did this, Seran thought, I should have refused the warden. She must have learned how to call forth effigies on her own, ripping them out of Imulai Mokarengen's histories and sagas and legends, animating the scissors to make her work easier. But when the scissors ran out of paper, they turned on the warden. Having denuded the city of its past, of its weight of stories, they began cutting effigies from the living stories of its people.

  Seran left Jaian to her fate and began up the stairs. But some of the scissors had already escaped, and they had left the doors to the library open. They were undoubtedly in the streets right now. Soon the city would be full of holes, and people made of paper slowly burning up, and the hungry sound of scissors.

  ROSARY AND GOLDENSTAR

  Geoff Ryman

  Geoff Ryman is the author of The Warrior Who Carried Life, "The Unconquered Country", The Child Garden, Was, Lust, and Air. His work 253, or Tube Theatre was published as hypertext fiction and won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. He has also won the World Fantasy, Campbell Memorial, Arthur C Clarke, British Science Fiction Association, Sunburst, James Tiptree, and Gaylactic Spectrum awards. His most recent novel, The King's Last Song, is set in Cambodia. Ryman currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

  The room was wood – floor, walls, ceiling.

  The doorbell clanged a second time. The servant girl Bessie finally answered it; she had been lost in the kitchen amid all the pans. She slid across the floor on slippers, not lifting her feet; she had a notion that she polished as she walked. The front door opened directly onto the night: snow. The only light was from the embers in the fireplace.

  Three huge men jammed her doorway. "This be the house of Squire Digges?" the smallest of them asked; and Bessie, melting in shyness, said something like, "Cmn gud zurs."

  They crowded in, stomping snow off their boots, and Bessie knelt immediately to try to mop it up with her apron. "Shoo! Shoo!" said the smaller guest, waving her away.

  The Master roared; the other door creaked like boots and in streamed Squire Digges, both arms held high. "Welcome! Good Count Vesuvius! Guests! Hah!" Unintroduced, he began to pump their hands.

  Vesuvius, the smaller man, announced in Danish that this was Squire Digges, son of Leonard and author of the lenses, then turned back and said in English that these two fine fellows were Frederik Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne.

  "We have corresponded!" said Squire Digges, still smiling and pumping. To him, the two Danes looked huge and golden-red with bronze beards and bobbed noses, and he'd already lost control of who was who. He looked sideways in pain at the Count. "You must pardon me, sirs?"

  "For what?"

  The Squire looked harassed and turned on the servant. "Bessie! Bessie, their coats! The door. Leave off the floor, girl!"

  Vesuvius said in Danish, "The gentleman has asked you to remove your coats at long last. For this he is sorry."

  One of the Danes smiled, his face crinkling up like a piecrust, and he unburdened himself of what must have been a whole seal hide. He dumped it on Bessie, who could not have been more than sixteen and was small for her years. Shaking his head, Digges slammed shut the front door. Bessie, buried under furs, began to slip across the gleaming floor as if on ice.

  "Bessie," said Digges in despair then looked over his shoulder. "Be careful of the floors, Messires, she polishes them so. Good girl, not very bright." He touched Bessie's elbow and guided her toward the right door.

  "He warns us that floors are dangerous."

  Rosenkrantz and Gyldenstierne eyed each other. "Perhaps we fall through?" They began to tiptoe.

  Digges guided Bessie through the door, and closed it behind her. He smiled and then unsmiled when there was a loud whoop and a falling crash within.

  "All's well, Bessie?"

  "Aye, zur."

  "We'll wait here for a moment. Uh, before we go in. The gentlemen will excuse me but I did not hear your names."

  "He's forgotten your names. These English cannot speak." Vesuvius smiled. "Is so easy to remember in English. This be noble Rosary and Goldenstar."

  "Sirs, we are honored. Honored beyond measure!"

  Mr. Goldenstar sniffed. "The whole place sags and creaks. Haven't the English heard of bricks?"

  Mr. Rosary beamed and gestured at the panelling and the turd-brown floor. "House. Beautiful. Beautiful!"

  Squire Digges began to talk to them as if they were children. "In. Warm!" He beat his own arms. "Warrrrrrrrrrm."

  Goldenstar was a military man, and when he saw the room beyond, he gave a cry and leapt back in alarm.

  It was not a dining hall but a dungeon. It had rough blocks, chains, and ankle irons that hung from the wall. "It's a trap!" he yelped, and clasped young Rosary to pull him back.

  From behind the table a tall, lean man rose up, all in black with a skull cap and lace around his neck. Inquisitor.

  "Oh!" laughed the Squire and touched his forehead. "No, no, no, no alarms, I beg.
Hah! The house once belonged to Philip Henslowe; he owns the theater out back; this is like a set from a play."

  Vesuvius blinked in fury. "This is his idea of a joke."

  "You should see the upstairs; it is full of naked Venuses!"

  "I think he just said upstairs is a brothel."

  Goldenstar ran his fingers over the walls. The rough stones, the iron rings and the chains had all been frescoed onto plaster. He blurted out a laugh. "They're all mad."

  "They are all strolling players. They do nothing but go to the theater. They pose and declaim and roar."

  Digges flung out a hand toward the man in black. "Now to the business at hand. Sirs! May… I… introduce… Doctor John DEE!"

  For the Doctor, Vesuvius had a glittery smile; but he said through his teeth, "They mime everything."

  "Ah!" Mr. Rosary sprang forward to shake the old man's hand. He was in love, eyes alight. "Queen Elisabetta. Magus!"

  Dr. John Dee rumbled, "I am called Mage, yes, but I am in fact the Advisor Philosophical to her Majesty."

  Digges beamed. "His Parallaticae commentationis and my own Alae seu scalae mathematicae were printed as a pair."

  Someone else attended, pale skinned, pink cheeked, and glossy from nose to balding scalp, with black eyes like currants in a bun and an expression like a barber welcoming you to his shop.

  "And this example," growled Digges, putting his hand on the young man's shoulder, "will not be known to you, but we hold him in high esteem, a family friend. This is Guillermus Shakespere."

  The young man presented himself. "A Rosary and a Goldenstar. These are names for poetry. Especially should one wish to contrast Religion and Philosophy."

  Vesuvius's lip curled. "You mock names?"

  "No no, of course not. I beg! Not that construction. It is but poetic… convenience. My own poor name summons up dragooned peasants shaking weapons. Or, or, an actor whose only roles are those of soldiers." The young man looked back and forth between the men, expecting laughter. They blinked and stood with their hands folded not quite into fists.