The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  In Old Days the Duke of Yoo disputed mightily with her neighbour the Duke of Hetteten over who rightly ruled the altiplano and its profitable potteries. From time immemorial it had been a place beyond: independently minded and stubborn of spirit, with little respect for gods or dukes. Wars were fought down generations, lying waste to fames and fortunes, and when in the end the House of Yoo prevailed, the peoples of the plateau had forgotten they ever had lords and mistresses and debts of fealty. It is a law of earth and stars alike that people should be well-governed, obedient and quiet in their ways, so the Duke of Yoo embarked on a campaign of civil discipline. Her house-corps had been decimated in the Porcelain Wars, so House Yoo hired mercenaries. Among them, my former unit, Gellet’s Javrosts.

  They speak of us still, up on the plateau. We are the monsters of their Great Nights, the haunters of their children’s dreams. We are legend. We are Gellet’s Javrosts. We are the new demons.

  For one Great Day and Great Night, we ran free. We torched the topless star-shrines of Javapanda and watched them burn like chimneys. We smashed the funerary jars and trampled the bones of the illustrious dead of Toohren. We overturned the houses of the holy, burned elders and kits in their homes. We lassoed rebels and dragged them behind our graapa, round and round the village until all that remained was a bloody rope. We forced whole communities from their homes; driving them across the altiplano until the snow heaped their bodies. And Arthur was at my side. We were not friends – there is too much history on this world for Human and Thent ever to be that. He was my badoon. You do not have a concept for it, let alone a word. A passionate colleague. A brother who is not related. A fellow devotee...

  We killed and we killed and we killed. And in our wake came the Duke of Yoo’s soldiers – restoring order, rebuilding towns, offering defense against the murderous renegades. It was all strategy. The Duke of Yoo knew the plateauneers would never love her, but she could be their saviour. Therefore a campaign of final outrages was planned. Such vileness! We were ordered to Glehenta, a pottery town at the head of Valley of the Kilns. There we would enter the Glotoonas – the birthing-creches – and slaughter every infant down to the last kit. We rode, Arthur at my side, and though human emotions are strange and distant to me, I knew them well enough to read the storm in his heart. Night-snow was falling as we entered Glehenta, lit by ten thousand starflowers. The people locked their doors and cowered from us. Through the heart of town we rode; past the great conical kilns, to the Glotoonas. Matres flung themselves before our graapa – we rode them down. Arthur’s face was darker than the Great Midnight. He broke formation and rode up to Gellet himself. I went to him. I saw words between your brother and our commander. I did not hear them. Then Arthur drew his blasket and in single shot blew the entire top of Gellet’s body to ash. In the fracas I shot down three of our troop; then we were racing through the glowing streets, our hooves clattering on the porcelain cobbles, the erstwhile Gellet’s Javrosts behind us.

  And so we saved them. For the Duke of Yoo had arranged it so that her Ducal Guard would fall upon us even as we attacked, annihilate us and achieve two notable victories: presenting themselves as the saviours of Glehenta, and destroying any evidence of their scheme. Your brother and I sprung the trap. But we did not know until leagues and months later, far from the altiplano. At the foot of the Ten Thousand Stairs we parted – we thought it safer. We never saw each other again, though I heard he had gone back up the stairs, to the Pelerines. And if you do find him, please don’t tell him what became of me. This is a shameful place.

  And I am ashamed that I have told you such dark and bloody truths about your brother. But at the end, he was honourable. He was right. That he saved the guilty – an unintended consequence. Our lives are made up of such.

  Certainly, we can continue outside on the hoondahvi porch. I did warn you that the music was irritating to human sensibilities.

  PLATE 8: V lucerna vesperum; Schaefferia: the Evening Candle. A solitary tree of the foothills of the Exx Palisades of Ishtaria, the Schaefferia is noted for its many upright, luminous blossoms, which flower in Venerian Great Evening and Great Dawn.

  Only the blossoms are reproduced. Card, folded and cut tissue, luminous paint (not reproduced). The original is also slightly radioactive.

  A COG RAILWAY runs from Camahoo Terminus to the Convent of the Starry Pelerines. The Starsview Special takes pilgrims to see the open sky. Our carriage is small, luxurious, intricate and ingenious in that typically Thent fashion, and terribly tedious. The track has been constructed in a helix inside Awk Mountain, so our journey consists of interminable, noisy spells inside the tunnel, punctuated by brief, blinding moments of clarity as we emerge on to the open face of the mountain. Not for the vertiginous!

  Thus, hour upon hour, we spiral our way up Mount Awk.

  Princes Latufui and I play endless games of Moon Whist but our minds are not on it. My forebodings have darkened after my conversation with the Thent hoondahvi owner in Camahoo. The Princess is troubled by my anxiety. Finally she can bear it no more.

  “Tell me about the Blue Empress. Tell me everything.”

  I GREW UP with two injunctions in case of fire: save the dogs and the Blue Empress. For almost all my life the jewel was a ghost-stone – present but unseen, haunting Grangegorman and the lives it held. I have a memory from earliest childhood of seeing the stone – never touching it – but I do not trust the memory. Imaginings too easily become memories, memories imaginings.

  We are not free in so many things, we of the landed class. Richard would inherit, Arthur would make a way in the worlds and I would marry as well as I could; land to land. The Barony of Rathangan was considered one of the most desirable in Kildare, despite Patrick’s seeming determination to drag it to the bankruptcy court. A match was made, and he was charming and bold; a fine sportsman and a very handsome man. It was an equal match – snide comments from both halves of the county. The Blue Empress was part of my treasure – on the strict understanding that it remain in the custody of my lawyers. Patrick argued – and it was there I first got an inkling of his true character – the wedding was off the wedding was on the wedding was off the wedding was on again and the banns posted. A viewing was arranged, for his people to itemise and value the Hyde treasure. For the first time in long memory, the Blue Empress was taken from its safe and displayed. Blue as the wide Atlantic it was, and as boundless and clear. You could lose yourself forever in the light inside that gem. And yes, it was the size of a thrush’s egg.

  And then the moment that all the stories agree on: the lights failed. Not so unusual at Grangegorman – the same grandfather who brought back the Blue Empress installed the hydro-plant – but when they came back on again; the sapphire was gone: baize and case and everything.

  We called upon the honour of all present, ladies and gentlemen alike. The lights would be put out for five minutes, and when they were switched back on, the Blue Empress would be back in the Hyde treasure. It was not. Our people demanded we call the police, Patrick’s people, mindful of their client’s attraction to scandal, were less insistent. We would make a further appeal to honour: if the Blue Empress was not back by morning, then we would call the guards.

  Not only was the Blue Empress still missing, so was Arthur.

  We called the Garda Siochana. The last we heard was that Arthur had left for the Inner Worlds.

  The wedding went ahead. It would have been a greater scandal to call it off. Patrick could not let the matter go: he went to his grave believing Arthur and I had conspired to keep the Blue Empress out of his hands. I have no doubt that Patrick would have found a way of forcing me to sign over possession of the gem to him, and selling it. Wastrel.

  As for the Blue Empress: I feel I am very near to Arthur now. One cannot run forever. We will meet, and the truth will be told.

  THEN LIGHT FLOODED our carriage as the train emerged from the tunnel on to the final ramp and there, before us, its spires and domes dusted with snow blown from the
high peaks, was the Convent of the Starry Pelerines.

  PLATE 9: V aquilonis vitis visionum: the Northern Littoral, or Ghost Vine. A common climber of the forests of the southern slopes of the Ishtari altiplano, domesticated and widely grown in Thent garden terraces. Its white, trumpet-shaped flowers are attractive, but the plant is revered for its berries. When crushed, the infused liquor known as pula creates powerful auditory hallucinations in Venerian physiology and form the basis of the Thent mystical hoondahvi cult. In Terrenes it produces a strong euphoria and a sense of omnipotence.

  Alkaloid-infused paper. Ida Granville-Hyde used Thent Ghost-Vine liquor to tint the paper in this cut. It is reported to be still mildly hallucinogenic.

  The Pilgrim’s Tale

  YOU’LL COME OUT on to the belvedere? It’s supposed to be off-limits to Terrenes – technically blasphemy – sacred space and all that – but the pelerines turn a blind eye. Do excuse the cough... ghastly, isn’t it? Sounds like a bag of bloody loose change. I don’t suppose the cold air does much for my lungs, but at this stage it’s a matter of damn.

  That’s Gloaming Peak there. You won’t see it until the cloud clears. Every Great Evening, every Great Dawn, for a few Earth-days at a time, the cloud breaks. It goes up, oh so much further than you could ever imagine. You look up, and up, and up and beyond it, you see the stars. That’s why the pelerines came here. Such a sensible religion. The stars are gods. One star, one god. Simple. No faith, no heaven, no punishment, no sin. Just look up and wonder. The Blue Pearl: that’s what they call our Earth. I wonder if that’s why they care for us. Because we’re descended from divinity? If only they knew. They really are very kind.

  Excuse me. Bloody marvellous stuff, this Thent brew. I’m in no pain at all. I find it quite reassuring that I shall slip from this too too rancid flesh swaddled in a blanket of beatific thoughts and analgesic glow. They’re very kind, the pelerines. Very kind.

  Now, look to your right. There. Do you see? That staircase, cut into the rock, winding up up up. The Ten Thousand Steps. That’s the old way to the altiplano. Everything went up and down those steps: people, animals, goods, palanquins and stickmen, traders and pilgrims and armies. Your brother. I watched him go, from this very belvedere. Three years ago, or was it five? You never really get used to the Great Day. Time blurs.

  We were tremendous friends, the way that addicts are. You wouldn’t have come this far without realising some truths about your brother. Our degradation unites us. Dear thing. How we’d set the world to rights, over flask after flask of this stuff. He realised the truth of this place early on. It’s the way to the stars. God’s waiting room. And we, this choir of shambling wrecks, wander through it, dazzled by our glimpses of the stars. Dear Arthur.

  We’re all darkened souls here, but he was haunted. Things done and things left undone, like the prayer book says. My father was a vicar – can’t you tell? He never spoke completely about his time with the javrosts. He hinted – I think he wanted to, very much, but was afraid of giving me his nightmares. That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled. But I would find him up here all times of the Great Day and Night, watching the staircase and the caravans and stick-convoys going up and down. Altiplano porcelain, he’d say. So fine you can read the Bible through it. Every cup, every plate, every vase and bowl, was portered down those stairs on the shoulders of a stickman. You know he served up on the Altiplano, in the Duke of Yoo’s Pacification. I wasn’t here then, but Aggers was, and he said you could see the smoke going up; endless plumes of smoke, so thick the sky didn’t clear and the pelerines went for a whole Great Day without seeing the stars. All Arthur would say about it was, that’ll make some fine china. That’s what made porcelain from the Valley of the Kilns so fine: bones – the bones of the dead, ground up into powder. He would never drink from a Valley cup – he said it was drinking from a skull.

  Here’s another thing about addicts – you never get rid of it. All you do is replace one addiction with another. The best you can hope for is that it’s a better addiction. Some become god-addicts – or gods, some throw themselves into worthy deeds, or self-improvement, or fine thoughts, or helping others, God help us all. Me, my lovely little vice is sloth – I really am an idle little bugger. It’s so easy, letting the seasons slip away; slothful days and indolent nights, coughing my life up one chunk at a time. For Arthur, it was the visions. Arthur saw wonders and horrors, angels and demons, hopes and fears. True visions – the things that drive men to glory or death. Visionary visions. It lay up on the altiplano, beyond the twists and turns of the Ten Thousand Steps. I could never comprehend what it was, but it drove him. Devoured him. Ate his sleep, ate his appetite. Ate his body and his soul and his sanity.

  It was worse in the Great Night... Everything’s worse in the Great Night. The snow would come swirling down the staircase and he saw things in it – faces – heard voices. The faces and voices of the people who had died, up there on the altiplano. He had to follow them, go up, into the Valley of the Kilns, where he would ask the people to forgive him – or kill him.

  And he went. I couldn’t stop him – I didn’t want to stop him. Can you understand that? I watched him from this very belvedere. The pelerines are not our warders, any of us is free to leave at any time, though I’ve never seen anyone leave, but Arthur. He left in the evening, with the lilac light catching Gloaming Peak. He never looked back. Not a glance to me. I watched him climb the steps to that bend there. That’s where I lost sight of him. I never saw or heard of him again. But stories come down the stairs with the stickmen and they make their way even to this little eyrie; stories of a seer – a visionary. I look and I imagine I see smoke rising, up there on the altiplano.

  It’s a pity you won’t be here to see the clouds break around the Gloaming, or look at the stars.

  PLATE 10 V genetric nives: Mother-of-snows (direct translation from Thent). Ground-cover hi-alpine of the Exx Palisades. The plant forms extensive carpets of thousands of minute white blossoms.

  The most intricate papercut in the Botanica Veneris. Each floret is three millimetres in diameter. Paper, ink, gouache.

  A HIGH-STEPPING SPIDER-CAR took me up the Ten Thousand Steps, past caravans of stickmen, spines bent, shoulders warped beneath brutal loads of finest porcelain.

  The twelve cuts of the Botanica Veneris I have given to the Princess, along with descriptions and botanical notes. She would not let me leave, clung to me, wracked with great sobs of loss and fear. It was dangerous; a sullen land with Great Night coming. I could not convince her of my reason for heading up the stairs alone, for they did not convince me. The one, true reason I could not tell her. Oh, I have been despicable to her! My dearest friend. But worse even than that, false.

  She stood watching my spider-car climb the steps until a curve in the staircase took me out of her sight. Must the currency of truth always be falsehood?

  Now I think of her spreading her long hair out, and brushing it, firmly, directly, beautifully, and the pen falls from my fingers...

  EGAYHAZY IS A closed city; hunched, hiding, tight. Its streets are narrow, its buildings leans towards each other; their gables so festooned with starflower that it looks like perpetual festival. Nothing could be further from the truth: Egayhazy is an angry city; aggressive and cowed: sullen. I keep my LedekhTeltai in my bag. But the anger is not directed at me, though from the story I heard at the Camahoo hoondahvi; my fellow humans on this world have not graced our species. It is the anger of a country under occupation. On walls and doors the proclamations of the Duke of Yoo are plastered layer upon layer: her pennant, emblazoned with the four white hands of House Yoo, flies from publics buildings, the radio station mast, tower tops and the gallows. Her javrosts patrol streets so narrow their graapa barely squeeze through them. In their passage, the citizens of Egayhazy flash jagged glares, mutter altiplano oaths. And there is another sigil: an eight-petalled flower; a blue so deep it seems almost to shine
. I see it stencilled hastily on walls and doors and the occupation-force posters. I see it in little badges sewn to the quilted jackets of the Egayhazians; and in tiny glass jars in low-set windows. In the market of Yent I witnessed javrosts upturn and smash a vegetable stall that dared to offer a few posies of this blue bloom.

  THE STAFF AT my hotel were suspicious when they saw me working up some sketches from memory of this blue flower of dissent. I explained my work and showed some photographs and asked what was this flower? A common plant of the high altiplano; they said. It grows up under the breath of the high snow; small and tough and stubborn. Its most remarkable feature is that it blooms when no other flower does – in the dead of the Great Night. The Midnight Glory was one name, though it had another, newer, which entered common use since the occupation: The Blue Empress.

  I knew there and then I had found Arthur.

  A PALL OF sulfurous smoke hangs permanently over the Valley of Kilns, lit with hellish tints from the glow of the kilns below. A major ceramics centre on a high, treeless plateau? How are the kilns fuelled? Volcanic vents do the firing, but they turn this long defile in the flank of Mount Tooloowera into a little hell of clay, bones, smashed porcelain, sand, slag and throat-searing sulphur. Glehenta is the last of the Porcelain Towns, wedged into the head of the valley, where the river Iddis still carries a memory of freshness and cleanliness. The pottery houses, like upturned vases, lean towards each other like companionable women.

  And there is the house to which my questions guided me: as my informants described; not the greatest but perhaps the meanest; not the foremost but perhaps the most prominent, tucked away in an alley. From its roof flies a flag, and my breath caught: not the Four White Hands of Yoo – never that, but neither the Blue Empress. The smoggy wind tugged at the hand-and-dagger of the Hydes of Grangegorman.