The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Instead—well.

  I was talking to my great-great-great-great-grandfather about cures for eye infections in cattle when something woke me up. I didn’t have to see it to know what it was.

  “On your feet,” said a voice above me.

  Here’s a curious fact for you. Nothing in the world feels quite like the two coils of flattened wire they wind round the base of a spear-shaft, presumably to stop the wood splitting as it dries. Maybe it wouldn’t be so distinctive applied to your hand, say, but when you feel it on your neck, just below the ear, you know immediately what it is.

  “I said,” the voice repeated, “on your feet. Are you deaf, wizard?”

  You also have a pretty good idea what’s going on. It means the king wants to see you. “All right,” I muttered through a mouthful of sleep, “I heard you the first time.”

  They made me run, seven miles in the pitch dark. I hate running.

  “Thank you,” the king said gravely, “for finding the time to see me.”

  You genuinely don’t know if he’s trying to be funny, or whether he isn’t actually aware of how a royal summons is carried out. He must know, surely. But in that case, why pretend otherwise?

  Actually, I quite like him; the Great Elephant, Heaven-Thunders-The-Truth, He-Who-Eats-Up-The-World. He has shrewd, sad eyes and he speaks quite quietly. He’s the sort of man who, if he was someone else and you met him at a wedding or a clan meeting or something, you’d think, here’s someone worth talking to. Everybody he ever meets is scared stiff of him, of course—me included, it goes without saying—and with very good reason. I imagine he’s equally terrified, all the time. On the whole, I’d say he copes better than most people would.

  “You came quickly.”

  “Yes, Lord. I ran all the way.”

  A faint smile. “Such energy. You must be exhausted.”

  Another trick he has is saying something like that and then shutting up, dead quiet, and sitting there perfectly still, looking at you. Naturally, you feel you’ve got to say something just to break the silence, before it drowns the entire world. And anything you say will, of course, be tactless, disrespectful, wrong and held against you for the rest of your painfully short life. But I was dog tired—the snake bounces about in my head when I run, and it feels like it weighs as much as a grown man—and I couldn’t be bothered. But then, I have the inestimable advantage of not fearing death. Well, not much.

  “You sent for me,” I said.

  “Did I? Oh yes. I almost forgot. I’m very angry with you.”

  My throat locked solid. “I’m sorry to hear that. What did I do?”

  He covered his mouth with his hand. “I gather my late brother had a daughter.”

  “Several,” I said, without thinking. He looked at me; mild surprise, more than anything else. Several—six, to be precise, and he had them all killed. And quite right, too.

  “One I didn’t know about.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  I chose my words carefully. “I believe so.”

  He nodded slowly, as if what I’d said was the crucial deciding factor in a momentous decision. I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye and quickly identified it with my peripheral vision. Then I woke up the snake and told her to get busy.

  “The same woman who bore my brother a daughter bore him a son,” he said quietly. “Is that true?”

  What a question. How was I supposed to know? Incredibly fortunate, therefore, that the king’s dead brother was now standing behind him, looking over his shoulder, with a look of mild disdain on his face. I lifted my head and caught his eye. He nodded.

  “I believe so, Lord,” I said.

  “So I have a nephew,” said the king. “Still alive.”

  Another nod. “I don’t know, Lord.”

  “Liar.” He said the word gently, the way a dog puts a dead bird in your hand. “He’s still alive. I want you to find him.”

  Behind his shoulder, a brisk shake of the head and a ferocious scowl. I risked a wink. “Of course. Straight away. I’ll do my very best.”

  There were two of them now; his late majesty the prince, and his wretched daughter, who of course I’d seen before. She was nursing a baby in her arms, as if to drive the point home. The snake, of course, was no help. She’d curled round the girl’s ankle and was rubbing her head against her leg. Sometimes I swear that snake thinks it’s a dog.

  “When you’ve found him,” the king went on, “come straight here and tell me. You’ll be admitted right away, any time, day or night. You will not tell anybody about what we’ve talked about.”

  A statement of fact rather than an order. I called back the snake. “Lord,” I said.

  “Thank you so much for your time. I won’t keep you any longer.”

  You back out of the king’s presence, keeping your eyes fixed on him until he can no longer see you. As I retreated, I heard something scuttling overhead in the thatch. The other royal personage nodded to me just as I was about to heave myself out through the door-hole. I left the two of them together. Enjoy, I thought.

  The guards outside, who’d brought me there, gave me a cold stare as though they’d never seen me before. I walked home, quickly. My feet hurt.

  There are worse lives, believe me. Shorter lives, too. I had six brothers, and now there’s only me. My brothers went off when they got their call-up, and I never saw them alive again. They tell me they made a good end, in a splendid battle which we won, and they’re quite happy and satisfied. Don’t feel sorry for us, they say, we’re sorry for you, stuck behind there in that rotten place. They, so they tell me, are soldiers in the army of Heaven. Fine.

  The snake found me when I was eight years old, bathing in the river. She must’ve been lying on the bottom, dead still, pretending to be a root or a stick; I didn’t see her. She glided up through the water and slowly coiled herself around my trunk—I remember, I was so scared I couldn’t move or struggle, all I thought was, I hope it won’t hurt too much being crushed to death. You can tell I was never very bright, even as a child.

  Hello, she said in my head. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to be your friend. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

  (Three lies, one after another)

  It was only then that I figured out what was happening. Hello, I said, can you hear me?

  Loud and clear, she said.

  Am I going to be a wizard?

  At that age, of course, you don’t know how to keep your thoughts separate from talking-to-the-snake. I don’t want to be a wizard, I thought. I want to be a soldier like my brothers.

  Fool, she said kindly. In ten years’ time all your brothers will be dead. So would you have been, without me. I’ve saved your life. You should be grateful.

  Oh, I thought; and that was all, really. I accepted my brothers’ deaths, then and there, and I never said anything to them. Will I have to go away and live with a smelly old man in a cave?

  It wasn’t getting any better. I’d seen a doctor once, and I’d been terrified—as intended, naturally. Suddenly I had a picture of me as a terrifying, smelly old man, with bits of bone and skin and bladder sewn into in my tangled hair. I was grinning, and everybody was scared to death of me. All right, I thought, I can be that.

  Fool, she said again. It’s not like that at all. I’m going to make you clever and wise. Don’t you want to be clever?

  As I said, I was a particularly stupid child. Half-wit, my mother called me; here, Half-wit, fetch the water, wipe your nose, stir this. It’d’ve been much better if I was clever.

  Yes, she said, much. Instead of being stupider than everyone, you’ll be smarter. Wouldn’t that be fine?

  But wizards don’t marry and have wives and children, I thought. That’s a bad thing. I’m not sure why, but it is.

  I could feel her shifting round in my head, like a dog making a nest in a blanket before it goes to sleep. Are you afraid of death? She asked.

  I supp
ose so. I haven’t thought about it much.

  Are you sad when people die? People you love.

  I don’t know. It’s never happened.

  She sort of flexed her coils, and I could feel them pressing against the inside of my skull. I probably made some sort of whimpering noise, but she ignored me. It will, she said, believe me. Listen, I’m about to start making you clever. Death is nothing, it isn’t important. It only matters because the people who are left behind, the people who love the person who dies, are very unhappy. In fact, it’s the worst unhappiness there is. But a wizard can see and hear dead people just like seeing and hearing the living. You can talk to them any time you like. That’s the most wonderful thing, love without loss; because love should be the best thing in the world, but because you lose the people you love, love is the worst thing; it hurts more than anything else, it’s an enemy to be avoided at all costs unless you want to spend most of your life in pain. Except for wizards. That’s why being one is the best thing of all, better than being strong or rich, better even than being king. And that’s what I’ve just given you. Isn’t that wonderful?

  I suppose so.

  You suppose so. Now be quiet, I need to go to sleep.

  My life has always been a sequence of impossible tasks, and this latest one was entirely in keeping with the trend. Go away and find a boy whose name and location nobody knows—nobody living, at any rate; normally, that wouldn’t be such a problem. Between them, my invisible friends and the snake would be able to handle a job like that. The impossibility comes in because the dead man who knew the answer to the question obviously wasn’t going to tell me; more impossible still, because if I did find the wretched kid, the dead prince would be seriously angry with me. Between death by impaling for failure to carry out the king’s orders and death by haunting for succeeding, there wasn’t a lot to choose. I’ve said I’m not afraid of death, and that’s true. Dying, though, is another matter. Dying slowly in great pain is something I actively try to avoid.

  I slept badly that night, which was enormously inconvenient. When I finally managed to nod off, there was nobody there but my old master; a terrible sign, because although he’s responsible for me, in this world and the next, he never could stand the sight of me.

  “The king said, find this boy. You live to serve the king. You serve the king as the sandal serves the foot, it has no other purpose. Therefore you must summon the prince, against his will if needs be, and force him to tell you where the boy is. You have no choice in the matter.”

  Stupid old fool. “Yes,” I said, “and if I do that, I’ll have the prince’s face inches from my own for the rest of my life, scowling and yelling at me. How long will I last? Ten days?”

  He shrugged. “You don’t matter,” he said.

  He was like that when he was alive. “There must be another way,” I said.

  “There is not. When I clap my hands, you will wake up.”

  “No, don’t do—” Too late. I sat up and found I was soaked in sweat. The snake shifted unhappily in my head. She doesn’t like the heat, which is really strange, for a snake.

  Why me? I asked her. Because you’re young, she replied. That’s typical of her. Factually correct and completely unhelpful.

  I thought about it for the rest of the night and most of the following morning, and the more I thought, the more obvious it became. I was going to have to kill the king, and set up this unknown boy in his place. No other way out.

  I really didn’t want to. The kings of the House of the Spear, Great Elephants, Eaters-Up-Of-The-World, have been a pretty useless lot, but His current Majesty was one of the better specimens, and since he’d come to the throne, life hadn’t got much better but it hadn’t got spectacularly worse. This made him a Good King, and the odds were pretty overwhelming that this kid I was proposing to replace him with would be a complete disaster, like his grandfather, great-uncle, great-great-grandfather, and so on back into the cloudy realm of faint memory.

  Furthermore, although I could think of half a dozen powerful lords who’d want him dead, all of them would also want to take his place, not see the royal spear and mat pass to some gawping brat of no relevance. Also, killing a king isn’t easy, which is why we still have kings. In all probability, it’d go horribly wrong and I’d be killed. But that was a probability rather than a certainty; two certainties, as I explained earlier. It really didn’t help one little bit that I liked the man. Oh, and I had three days, four at the most, before I’d be deemed to have failed in my task and executed. No pressure.

  To kill a king (please listen carefully; I’m only going to say this once) you need three things: opportunity, the forbearance of others, and a weapon. Opportunity doesn’t come much better than come straight here and tell me, you’ll be admitted right away, any time, day or night. The forbearance of others can take many forms, from active conspiracy to a guard falling asleep at his post; some you can plan for, others the snake can arrange, some are pure luck. The weapon? Spoilt for choice. Of course, you need one other thing. You need to want to do it.

  Meanwhile, I had a job to do.

  The snake has her own way of doing things; she doesn’t tell and I don’t ask. This time I let her go, then climbed up the mountain and spent the day sitting in a cave, my back, thinking hard about how to go about murdering the king.

  Just as it was starting to get dark, she came back. She’d found the boy. He was in an army camp about a day’s walk away to the south. Simple as that.

  Like so many people these days, I never knew my father. He went off to war, my mother told me, and that was the end of him. Of course, she wasn’t my mother, though she never told me that. But the snake told me, bless her malicious heart, when I was nine years old. The subject came up in a discussion we were having about my future. We still talked occasionally then.

  I don’t want to go away, I remember telling her. I don’t want to go and live a long way away, in a cave with a smelly old man. I’d miss my mother and my sisters.

  She’s not your mother. They aren’t your sisters.

  Liar, I said, and the snake hissed inside my head and swelled her coils until I was sure my skull would burst. Liar, I repeated. It’s not true.

  You know it’s true, she said. Everything I tell you is true. Even if I wanted to deceive you, I couldn’t. We’re too close.

  Even at that early stage, I knew that. So who’s my real mother?

  She lives a long way away. The man she’s married to is not your father. She doesn’t want to see you, ever. The woman who looks after you was given twenty head to take you away. She’s fond of you, but she’s not your mother. You have nobody, except me.

  The snake doesn’t lie, that’s the thing. The snake doesn’t love me. Love doesn’t come anywhere near it. Love compared with what the snake feels for me is a rabbit standing next to an elephant. I am her soul, and she is mine. Unfortunately.

  There; she didn’t like me saying that. She tells the truth but doesn’t always like hearing it.

  So, one dark night, I took an old rusty spear-blade that had belonged to my grandfather, my mother’s father, the father of the woman who wasn’t my mother, and very quietly I sawed a hole in the reeds and crept out of the hut, across the cattle-pen, through a gap in the thorn hedge and away. I walked for three days, with nothing to eat and no sandals on my feet (I’d never been more than an hour’s walk from home before) until I reached a high mountain standing on its own in the middle of the plain. The snake showed me a kloof whose mouth was almost hidden by thorn-bushes and scrub. It was just before mid-day, and the shadow of the mountain made the kloof as dark as midnight. Well go on, the snake told me. So I threaded my way in past the bushes and called out, “Hello?”

  My master was sitting on a stool in the middle of the cattle-pen; just sitting, his hands on his knees, his head a little to one side. He was a big old man with white hair in braids, and there were bits of things I didn’t like to look at stuffed or caught in the weave. He must’ve seen me but
gave no sign.

  “Hello,” I repeated.

  He can’t hear you, said a voice, and another voice laughed. Another one, a woman’s, said, You must be the boy. Well?

  “Yes,” I said out loud, “or I think so. I’ve come to learn to be a wizard.”

  Several other voices laughed; a man’s voice said, Not a wizard, a doctor. That’s your first mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know.”

  That’s no excuse, said the voice, and the female said, Leave him alone, don’t pick on him. A lot of voices laughed at that. You need to learn, said the nasty male voice. If we’re kind and gentle, you won’t learn anything. But this—and something slapped the side of my face so hard I staggered—will make sure you don’t get it wrong ever again.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  They found that hilarious, but I’d said the right thing, and from then on, they were mostly on my side. Gradually, of course, as time went by, I got to know them all, though some were more friendly than others. Mostly they were doctors, long dead; they hung about the kloof the way old people hang about the smithy in the cold weather, for the company and to keep warm. Some of them never told me who they were, who they’d been, or even if they’d ever been human, and it’s not the sort of thing you ask about. Mostly, like I said, they were good to me, and when they weren’t, I probably deserved it.

  Anything even vaguely like an education or training, I got from them; my master was pretty much useless, as the voices didn’t hesitate to point out when they thought he couldn’t hear them. He’d forget about me for weeks at a time, then suddenly remember and try and teach me something—but usually it was garbled or no use for anything or just plain wrong. The voices wanted me to kill him and take his place; as is only fitting, they used to say, which I didn’t understand. I could see their point, but I’m not a natural killer; it’s something I do rarely, and then only when I have to, usually when it’s too late. That, they assured me, is a weakness that would hold me back and ultimately bring me to grief. I hope they’re wrong, though I have to say, they’ve always been right about everything.