The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  The third guard – a nimble fingered Osprian – whipped out a throwing knife but before he could loose it the mace twittered through the air and bounced from his head. He dropped soundlessly, arms outstretched.

  “They are called Anthiric columns.” The woman put her forefinger against Grenti’s forehead and gently pushed him over. He toppled and lay there on his side in the muck, still stiff, still trembling, still with eyes bulgingly focused on nothing.

  “That was with one hand.” She held up the other big fist, and had produced from somewhere a sheathed sword, gold glittering on the hilt. “Next I draw this sword, forged in the Old Time from the metal of a fallen star. Only six living people have seen the blade. You would find it extremely beautiful. On the downside I would kill you with it.”

  The last of the guards exchanged a brief glance with Fallow, then tossed his axe away and sprinted off.

  “Huh,” said the woman, with a slight wrinkling of disappointment about her red brows. “Just so you know, if you run I will catch you in...” She narrowed her eyes and pushed out her lips, looking Fallow appraisingly up and down. The way he might have appraised the children. He found he didn’t like being looked at that way. “About four strides.”

  He ran.

  She caught him in three and he was suddenly on his face with a mouthful of dirty cobblestone and his arm twisted sharply behind his back.

  “You’ve no idea who you’re dealing with you stupid bitch!” He struggled but her grip was iron, and he squealed with pain as his arm was twisted still more sharply.

  “It is true I am no high thinker.” Her voice showed not the slightest strain. “I like simple things well done and have no time to philosophise. Would you like to tell me where the parcel is, or shall I beat you until it falls out?”

  “I work for Kurrikan!” he gasped out.

  “I’m new in town. Names work no magic on me.”

  “We’ll find you!”

  She laughed. “Of course. I am no hider. I am Javre, First of the Fifteen. Javre, Knight Templar of the Golden Order. Javre, Breaker of Chains, Breaker of Oaths, Breaker of Faces.” And here she gave him a blinding punch which, he was pretty sure, broke his nose and filled the back of his mouth with the salt taste of blood. “To find me, you need only ask for Javre.” She leaned over him, breath tickling at his ear. “It is once you find me that your difficulties begin. Now, where is that parcel?”

  A pinching sensation began in Fallow’s hand. Mildly painful to begin with, then more, and more, a white hot burning up his arm that made him whimper like a dog. “Ah, ah, ah, inside pocket, inside pocket!”

  “Very good.” He felt hands rifling through his clothes, but could only lie limp, moaning as the jangling of his nerves gradually subsided. He craned his neck around to look up at her and curled back his lips. “I swear on my fucking front teeth –”

  “Do you?” As her fingers found the hidden pocket and slid the package free. “That’s rash.”

  JAVRE PRESSED FINGER against thumb and flicked Fallow’s two front teeth out.

  A trick she had learned from an old man in Suljuk and, as with so many things in life, all in the wrist. She left him hunched in the road struggling to cough them up.

  “The next time we meet I will have to show you the sword!” she called out as she strode away, wedging the package down behind her belt. Goddess, these Sipanese were weaklings. Was there no one to test her anymore?

  She shook her sore hand out. Probably her fingernail would turn black and drop off, but it would grow back. Unlike Fallow’s teeth. And it was scarcely the first fingernail she had lost. Including that memorable time she had lost the lot and toenails too in the tender care of the Prophet Khalul. Now there had been a test. For a moment, she almost felt nostalgic for her interrogators. Certainly she felt nostalgic for the feeling of shoving their chief’s face into his own brazier when she escaped. What a sizzle he had made!

  But maybe whatever preening crime-lord, sinister slum master or corrupt Sipanese nobleman employed Fallow would be outraged enough to send a decent class of killer after her. Then she could go after them. Hardly the great battles of yesteryear, but something to while away the evenings.

  Until then Javre walked, swift and steady with her shoulders back and the parcel dangling from her loose fingers. She loved to walk. With every stride she felt her own strength. Every muscle utterly relaxed yet ready to turn the next step in a split instant into mighty spring, sprightly roll, deadly strike. Without needing to look she felt each person about her, judged their threat, predicted their attack, imagined her response, the air around her alive with calculated possibilities, the surroundings mapped, the distances known, all things of use noted. The sternest tests are those you do not see coming, so Javre was the weapon always sharpened, the weapon never sheathed, the answer to every question.

  But no blade came darting from the dark. No arrow, no flash of fire, no squirt of poison. No pack of assassins burst from the shadows.

  Sadly.

  Only a pair of drunk Northmen wrestling outside Pombrine’s place, one of them snarling something about the bald boss. She paid them no mind as she trotted up the steps, ignoring the several frowning guards, who were of a quality inferior even to Fallow’s men, down the hallway and into the central salon, complete with fake marble, cheap chandelier and profoundly unarousing mosaic of a lumpy couple fucking horsestyle. Evidently the evening rush had yet to begin. Whores of both sexes and one Javre still was not entirely sure about lounged bored upon the overwrought furniture.

  Pombrine was busy admonishing one of his flock for overdressing, but looked up startled when she entered. “You’re back already? What went wrong?”

  Javre laughed full loud. “Everything.” His eyes widened, and she laughed louder yet. “For them.” And she took his wrist and pressed the parcel into his hand.

  POMBRINE GAZED DOWN at that unassuming lump of animal skin. “You did it?”

  The woman thumped one heavy arm about his shoulders and gave them a squeeze. He gasped as his bones creaked. Without doubt she was of exceptional size, but even so the casual strength of it was hardly to be believed. “You do not know me. Yet. I am Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.” She looked down at him and he had an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation of being a naughty child helpless in his mother’s grasp. “When I agree to a challenge I do not shirk it. But you will learn.”

  “I keenly anticipate my education.” Pombrine wriggled free of the crushing weight of her arm. “You did not... open it?”

  “You told me not to.”

  “Good. Good.” He stared down, the smile half-formed on his face, hardly able to believe it could have been this easy.

  “My payment, then.”

  “Of course.” He reached for the purse.

  She held up one calloused hand. “I will take half in flesh.”

  “In flesh?”

  “That’s what you pedal here, no?”

  He raised his brows. “Half would be a great quantity of flesh.”

  “I get through it. And I mean to stay a while.”

  “Lucky us,” he muttered.

  “I’ll take him.”

  “An excellent choice, I –”

  “And him. And him. And her.” Javre rubbed her rough palms together. “She can get the lads warmed up, I am not paying to wank anyone off myself.”

  “Naturally not.”

  “I am a woman of Thond, and have grand appetites.”

  “So I begin to see.”

  “And for the sun’s sake someone draw me a bath. I smell like a heated bitch already, I dread to imagine the stink afterward. I will have every tom cat in the city after me!” And she burst out laughing again.

  One of the men swallowed. The other looked at Pombrine with an expression faintly desperate as Javre herded them into the nearest room.

  “... you, remove your trousers. You, get the bandages off my tits. You would scarcely credit how tightly I have to strap this lot down to get anything done...
”

  The door snapped mercifully shut.

  Pombrine seized Scalacay, his most trusted servant, by the shoulder and drew him close.

  “Go to the Gurkish temple off the third canal with all haste, the one with the green marble pillars. Do you know it?”

  “I do, master.”

  “Tell the priest that chants in the doorway that you have a message for Ishri. That Master Pombrine has the item she was asking after. For Ishri, do you understand?”

  “For Ishri. Master Pombrine has the item.”

  “Then run to it!”

  Scalacay dashed away leaving Pombrine to hurry to his office with hardly less haste, the package clutched in one sweaty hand. He fumbled shut the door and turned the key, the five locks closing with a reassuring metallic clatter.

  Only then did he allow himself to breathe. He placed the package reverently upon his desk. Now he had it, he felt the need to stretch out the moment of triumph. To weigh it down with the proper gravitas. He went to his drinks cabinet and unlocked it, took his grandfather’s bottle of Shiznadze from the place of honour. That man had lived his whole life waiting for a moment worthy of opening that bottle. Pombrine smiled as he reached for the corkscrew, trimming away the lead from the neck.

  How long had he worked to secure that cursed package? Circulating rumours of his business failings when in fact he had never been so successful. Placing himself in Carcolf’s way again and again until finally they seemed to happen upon each other by chance. Wriggling himself into a position of trust while the idiot courier thought him a brainless stooge, clambering by miniscule degrees to a perch from which he could get his eager hands around the package, and then... unhappy fate! Carcolf had slipped free, the cursed bitch, leaving Pombrine with nothing but ruined hopes. But now... happy fate! The thuggery of that loathsome woman Javre had by some fumbling miracle succeeded where his genius had been so unfairly thwarted.

  What did it matter how he had come by it, though? His smile grew wider as he eased the cork free. He had the package. He turned to gaze upon his prize again.

  Pop! An arc of fizzy wine missed his glass and spurted across his Kadiri carpet. He stared open mouthed. The package was hanging in the air by a hook. Attached to the hook was a gossamer thread. The thread disappeared through a hole in the glass roof high above where he now saw a black shape spread-eagled.

  Pombrine made a despairing lunge, bottle and glass tumbling to the floor and spraying wine, but the package slipped through his clutching fingers and was whisked smoothly upwards out of his reach.

  “Guards!” he roared, shaking his fist. “Thief!”

  A moment later he realised, and his rage turned in a flash to withering horror.

  Ishri would soon be on her way.

  WITH A PRACTICED jerk of her wrist Shev twitched the parcel up and into her waiting glove.

  “What an angler,” she whispered to herself as she thrust it into her pocket and was away across the steeply-pitched roof, knee pads sticky with tar doing most of the work. Astride the ridge and she scuttled to the chimney, flicked the rope into the street below, was over the edge in a twinkling and swarming down. Don’t think about the ground, never think about the ground. It’s a nice place to be but you wouldn’t want to get there too quickly...

  “What a climber,” she whispered to herself as she passed a large window, a garishly decorated and gloomily lit salon coming into view, and – She gripped tight to the rope and stopped dead, gently swinging.

  She really did have a pressing engagement with not being caught by Pombrine’s guards, but within the room was one of those sights that one could not simply slide past. Four, possibly five, or even six naked bodies had formed, with most impressive athleticism, a kind of human sculpture – a grunting tangle of gently shifting limbs. While she was turning her head sideways on to make sense of it the lynch-pin of the arrangement, who Shev took at first glance for a red-haired strongman, looked straight at her.

  “Shevedieh?”

  Decidedly not a man, but very definitely strong. Even with hair clipped close there was no mistaking her.

  “Javre? What the hell are you doing here?”

  She raised a brow at the naked bodies entwined about her. “Is that not obvious?”

  Shev was brought to her senses by the rattle of guards in the street below. “You never saw me!” And she slid down the rope, hemp hissing through her gloves, hit the ground hard and sprinted off just as a group of men with weapons drawn came barrelling around the corner.

  “Stop thief!”

  “Get him!”

  And, particularly shrill, Pombrine desperately wailing, “My package!”

  Shev jerked the cord in the small of her back and felt the pouch split, the caltrops scattering in her wake, heard the shrieks as a couple of the guards went tumbling. Sore feet they’d have in the morning. But there were still more following.

  “Cut him off!”

  “Shoot him!”

  She took a sharp left, heard the flatbow string an instant later, the twitter as the bolt glanced from the wall beside her and off into the night. She peeled off her gloves as she ran, one smoking from the friction, and flung them over her shoulder. A quick right, the route well-planned in advance, of course, and she sprang up onto the tables outside Verscetti’s, bounding from one to the next with great strides, sending cutlery and glassware flying, the patrons floundering up, clutching at her, at each other, tumbling over in their shock, a ragged violinist flinging himself for cover.

  “What a runner,” she whispered to herself, and leaped from the last table, over the clutching hands of a guard diving from her left and a reveller from her right, catching the little cord behind the sign that said Verscetti’s as she fell and giving it a good tug.

  There was a flash like lightning as she rolled, an almighty bang as she came up, the murky night at once illuminated, the frontages of the buildings ahead picked out white. There were screams and squeals and a volley of detonations. Behind her, she knew, blossoms of purple fire would be shooting across the street, showers of golden sparks, a display suitable for a baron’s wedding.

  “That Qohdam certainly can make fireworks,” she whispered to herself, resisting the temptation to stop and watch the show and instead slipping down a shadowy snicket, shooing away a mangy cat, scurrying on low for three dozen strides and ducking into the narrow garden, struggling to keep her quick breath quiet. She ripped open the packet she had secured among the roots of the dead willow, unfurling the white robe and wriggling into it, pulling up the cowl and waiting in the shadows, the big votive candle in one hand, ears sifting at the night.

  “Shit,” she muttered. As the last echoes of her fiery diversion faded she could hear, faintly, but coming closer, the calls of Pombrine’s searching guards, doors rattling as they tried them one by one.

  “Where did he go?”

  “I think this way!”

  “Bloody firework burned my hand! I’m really burned, you know!”

  “My package!”

  “Come on, come on,” she muttered. To be caught by these idiots would be among the most embarrassing moments of her career. It might even make the top five, which was saying something. That time she’d been stuck in a marriage gown half way up the side of the Mercers guildhall in Adua with flowers in her hair but no underwear and a steadily growing crowd of onlookers below would take some beating, but still. “Come on, come on, come –”

  Now, from the other direction, she heard the chanting, and grinned. The Sisters were always on time. She heard their feet now, the regular tramping blotting out the shouting of Pombrine’s guards and the wailing of a woman temporarily deafened by the fireworks. Louder the feet, louder the heavenly song, and the procession passed the garden, the women all in white, all hooded, lit candles held stiffly before them, ghostly in the gloom as they marched by in unison.

  “What a priestess,” Shev whispered to herself, and threaded from the garden, jostling her way into the midst of the processio
n. She tipped her candle to the left, so its wick touched that of her neighbour. The woman frowned across and Shev winked back.

  “Give a girl a light, would you?”

  With a fizzle it caught and she fell into step, adding her own joyous note to the chant as they processed down Caldiche Street and over the Fintine Bridge, the masked revellers parting respectfully to let them through. Pombrine’s place, and the increasingly frantic searching of his guards, and the furious growling of a pair of savagely arguing Northmen dwindled sedately into the mists behind.

  It was dark by the time she slipped silently through her own open window, past the stirring drapes, and crept around her comfortable chair. Carcolf was asleep in it, one strand of yellow hair fluttering around her mouth as she breathed. She looked young with eyes closed and face relaxed, shorn of that habitual sneer she had for everything. Young, and very beautiful. Bless this fashion for tight trousers! The candle cast a faint glow in the downy hairs on her cheek, and Shev felt a need to reach up and lay her palm upon that face, and stroke her lips with her thumb – But, lover of risks though she was, that would have been too great a gamble. So instead she shouted, “Boo!”

  Carcolf leaped up like a frog from boiling water, crashed into a table and nearly fell, lurched around, eyes wide. “Bloody hell,” she muttered, taking a shuddering breath. “Do you have to do that?”

  “Have to? No.”

  Carcolf pressed one hand to her chest. “I think you might have opened the stitches.”

  “You unbelievable baby.” Shev pulled the robe over her head and tossed it away. “It barely broke the skin.”

  “The loss of your good opinion wounds me more deeply than any blade.”

  Shev unhooked the belts that held her thief’s tools, unbuckled her climbing pads and started to peel off her black clothes, acting as if it was nothing to her whether Carcolf watched or not. But she noted with some satisfaction that it was not until she was slipping on a clean gown that Carcolf finally spoke, and in a voice slightly hoarse besides “Well?”

  “Well what?”