The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The other four councilors faced her, united. She had just been outvoted: irregular, but she had no illusions about what they had done behind her back.

  “Falcon,” the Tree Councilor said, in their unmovable voice, “we are short of options. Our people burn in the streets. Without them, we too will fall. Accept their offer. We knew we were not negotiating from a position of strength.”

  “We’ll regret this,” she said bitterly.

  “Anything can be survived,” the Snowcat Councilor said, “so long as one is still alive to survive it. You’re the second-oldest of us. Are you going to fold up and die so easily? Especially since you’re the one who brought us the beacon in the first place?”

  “It was that or have no last resort at all,” she shot back. “Or did you think we would stand a chance against people slavering after the wine?” She looked over her shoulder at Ahrep-na. “Let me ask this, then, Ahrep-na. Are you going to take the Wine of Blossoms for yourself?”

  “That is the one of the two guarantees I will offer you,” Ahrep-na said easily. “I will not touch your supply of the wine, nor will the soldiers I will raise for you. Or did you think I was human enough to have any use for it?”

  The Falcon Councilor was accustomed to envy, or submission, or greed. It had been a long time since she had seen contempt.

  “You said two guarantees,” she said. “What is the other?”

  Ahrep-na’s eyes were sweet with malice. The nameless man stared straight ahead. “I will win this for you,” Ahrep-na said, “with the mercenaries I raise.”

  “Of course you will,” the Falcon Councilor said, wondering what the trap was. “Very well. We will contract you under those terms.”

  Ahrep-na’s smile was like a honed knife.

  His name was Loi Ruharn, and he was one of the councilors’ generals. Most people knew him, however, as the Falcon’s Whore.

  He had been born Korhosh Ruharn, in one of the poorest quarters of the impoverished city-dome known ironically as the Jewel of Nasteng. As a girlform child, Ruharn had played with toys scavenged from stinking trash heaps in alleys, and watched with pinched eyes while his parents argued over which of the religious offerings they had to neglect this month because otherwise they would be too hungry to work, and swore he would never grow up to live in a crowded home with six brothers and sisters, wondering every night if he would be sold to the Gardeners like the daughter of the Ohn family next door.

  As soon as he was old enough and strong enough, Ruharn ran away and enlisted in a noble household’s private army. He might have died there. While the Council of Five ruled Nasteng entire, they didn’t interfere with the nobles’ squabbles so long as they didn’t threaten the councilors themselves. But Ruharn acquitted himself well in battle, mostly through a combination of suicidal determination and a knack for small-unit tactics, and he rose quickly in the ranks.

  That by itself wouldn’t have made him remarkable. There were plenty of talented soldiers, and most of them died young anyway, the way battle luck went. Rather, he came to the Falcon Councilor’s attention as a minor novelty, as a womanform soldier who lived as a man. For all her years, she’d never taken such a lover before.

  The Falcon Councilor wouldn’t stoop to take a common-born lover, but that was easy enough to finesse. She offered riches; she offered to buy Ruharn a commission in the Council’s own army, and an adoption into a noble family; and most of all she offered a place in her bed. Ruharn wasn’t sentimental about the honor of his chosen profession, although he knew what people would be saying about him. He accepted.

  Today, almost six months since the invasion had begun, he was pacing in the command bower of the councilors’ fastness. It was decorated with vines from which cloudflowers grew. The vines watered themselves, a neat trick. Irritatingly, they also left puddles, which you’d think he’d know to step around by now. The last time he’d yanked off a table runner and used it to soak up the moisture, he’d been yelled at by General Iyuden, who was insufferable about ornamental items. But Iyuden came from one of Nasteng’s oldest, wealthiest families. He wasn’t about to have that argument with her.

  Arrayed before Ruharn were videoscreens of Nasteng’s defenses. It didn’t take any kind of experience to see how inadequate they had been. He had read the reports and made his recommendations. It wasn’t so much that the senior generals had disagreed as that no recommendation would have made much of a difference.

  He didn’t know what had happened in the four days since the gateway fastness of Istefnis, on the surface, had been crushed into crumbs of marble and metal and human motes by the invaders. But the mercenaries the councilors had hired had brought with them a fleet of starflyers, a horde of groundswarmers. Nasteng’s unnamed enemies had slowly fallen back before the onslaught of hellspikes and icemetal bursts and frenzied gnawers. You could, if you were sufficiently innocent of electromagnetic signatures and spectral flourishes, take it for a particularly disorganized fireworks display. Nasteng itself was now haloed by a staggering murdercloud of debris, whether glowing, glimmering, or gyring dark. It was just as well they weren’t putting satellites into orbit anytime soon.

  Two things bothered Ruharn about the mercenaries’ forces, for all their successes. (More than two. But he had to start somewhere.) First was the question of logistics. The senior general had let drop that the contract had mentioned logistical arrangements. As a staff general, Ruharn had hoped to learn details. Had looked, in fact. So far as he could tell, however, the starflyers and groundswarmers had appeared out of nowhere. It wasn’t inconceivable that this was advanced foreign technology—there seemed to be a lot of that going around—but it still made him suspicious.

  The other thing was the way the mercenaries fought. When the Falcon Councilor had told him about the arrangement—the private conversation, not the staff meeting where he’d heard the official version—she had indicated every faith in the mercenaries’ abilities. So far, Ruharn observed that the mercenaries relied on sheer numbers, wave after wave of suffocation rather than strategy. To be sure, the method was working, yet he couldn’t help feeling the councilors could have spent their coin more wisely.

  The councilors’ personal army was used primarily for quashing the nobles’ personal armies and secondarily for quashing the occasional revolution. So he didn’t have great confidence in his conclusions. Yet it was impossible to serve with any diligence without picking up a few fundamentals of the military art.

  As it turned out, he was turning the problem over in his mind—it wasn’t as if he had a hell of a lot else to do, since for the first time in his so-called career he was caught up on paperwork—when a message made him forget it completely. He found it on top of his correspondence for the afternoon, smuggled in by who knew what method, a note on the back of a flyer. It said, simply, I need your help.

  Ruharn would have dismissed it as a prank or a trap, except he recognized the handwriting, even twenty-three years later, for all the changes. The writer still had that particular way of drawing crossbars, of slanting hooks. He assumed she still lived in the same house, or at least the same neighborhood, or she would have said something more to guide him.

  It wasn’t difficult to slip out of the fastness and to the surface, in one of the bubblecars whose use was reserved to the councilors’ favorites. The old neighborhood was some six hours away, to the north and east of Istefnis. Ruharn expected to be discovered eventually, but as long as he wasn’t caught cheating on the Falcon Councilor, he didn’t think there would be any lasting consequences. Assuming he didn’t lose his life to some mine while walking down the street, or break his neck tripping over rubble.

  The bubblecar’s driver was a prim woman in the Falcon Councilor’s livery. When she glanced back at Ruharn, her eyes were momentarily sly. Ruharn didn’t notice.

  During the ride, he alternated between looking out the window and looking at the status displays, which were connected to the moon’s defense systems. He wore the plainest clothes he owne
d, which weren’t very, a severe coat over a suit of soft dark brown with gold-embroidered gingko leaves, neatly fitted trousers, and boots likewise embellished with gold. In the neighborhood where he had grown up, the boots alone would have gotten him robbed, which was why he came armed. Two guns and a knife, the latter being ceremonial, but he kept it sharp on principle. Given his childhood, he was actually better in a knife fight than with handguns.

  In the neighborhood where he had grown up, you would also have had one hell of a time finding a fence capable of dealing with items so fine, but that didn’t mean no one was stupid enough to try. Maybe his uniform would have been a better idea, except he didn’t want to give anyone the notion that he was there on official business.

  He hadn’t been back in twenty-three years, since he had run away, although from time to time he sent money home. No one from his family had ever acknowledged the payments. He hadn’t expected them to; would, in fact, have been obscurely humiliated to hear from them.

  The bubblecar wound through streets choked by devastation. Devastation was not new to Ruharn. He had grown up with decaying walls and the debris of blown-away hopes. Nor was he a stranger to battlefield ruin: red dried to blots brown-black, lungs sloughed into gray slime, stinging dust in the air. Even so, dry as his eyes were, the pitted streets and pitiful crumpled corpses were somehow different when they were dead at strangers’ hands.

  “Here we are,” the driver said. She didn’t bother to hide her skepticism.

  “Thank you,” Ruharn said distantly. He put on a filter, then stepped out. The bubblecar didn’t wait to accelerate away. Sensible woman.

  His memory was still good, despite the damage that had been done. Undoubtedly some of it had been local warfare, not recent either. He made his way through the streets, not too fast and not too slow, pricklingly aware that the few survivors were watching him.

  The house had changed a little. Ruharn was certain that the old wind chimes had been decorated by little clay flowers. The new ones had what might charitably be described as rotund four-legged animals (what kind was impossible to say). He couldn’t, however, discount the possibility that it was the same set of chimes with different decorations. The girl he had known had always liked chimes. He stepped up to the door—if this was an ambush, so be it—and knocked. “Merenne,” he called out. “I’m here. It’s Ruharn.”

  For long moments he thought that the house was chewed up and empty inside, that he’d wasted the trip. Then a voice barely familiar, scratchy with hardship, called back, “I’m coming.” Soon enough the door opened.

  “Merenne,” Ruharn said again, voice unsteady. He did not bow. She would have taken offense.

  Merenne was shorter than he was, and her hair had gone gray. She looked fifteen years older than he was. In fact she was his younger by six. The clothes she wore were neatly stitched, and patched besides. The shirt was livened by embroidery, mostly geometrical motifs. Ruharn remembered how assiduously they had both picked apart old handkerchiefs and wrapping cloths to scavenge brightly colored thread for the purpose. She had smiled easily then, as a girl, despite the fact that her shoulders were already growing hunched with the work she had to do. He doubted she smiled easily now. She had been his favorite sister, for whom he had saved pittances to trade for candies, whom he had soothed to sleep with bloodthirsty stories (even then he had had an interest in weapons), and he had left her behind without so much as saying goodbye because staying was unbearable.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, as simple and sharp as a mirror-break. And: “I thought something of your old voice would remain. But I wouldn’t have known it was you at all. Come in.”

  Ruharn’s mouth twisted. He hadn’t thought about his voice, now a tenor, for years. But he stepped through the threshold. The place was too quiet. Where was everyone? Not that he had so much as known that Merenne herself was still alive. For all he knew, some plague had killed them all years ago.

  “I almost didn’t come,” he said. “But I did. Say what you have to say.”

  Merenne didn’t respond, but instead led him through the house. It didn’t take long. The Falcon Councilor would have considered it barely adequate as a closet. Ruharn had always been amused by her misconceptions about how many people you could squeeze into shelter if you really had to.

  There were three rooms, and people would all have slept together in the largest, partly for warmth, partly for community. The first thing that caught Ruharn’s eye was the dolls: two of them, one-third scale. They had been covered neatly by cloths. He wondered if some absent child had left them that way, tucking them in for the night.

  The dolls he had grown up playing with had had brass tacks for eyes that were forever falling out. (“Poison gas rots out their eyes in battle,” he had said to wide-eyed little Merenne, long ago. It had been funnier then.) The dolls here were made of some smooth, lambent resin, and their eyes shone like sea-lenses over delicately sculpted noses and lips painted perfect dusky pink. Their hair had been carefully styled, with miniature enameled clasps holding the strands in place. He had seen less beautiful statuettes in the councilors’ homes.

  “Go on,” Merenne said. “Look.” As he bent to lift one of the cloths, she added, “You used to have a grand-nephew and a grand-niece.”

  Ruharn didn’t ask what if they had been her own grandchildren, or those of their siblings. Or what had happened to their siblings, for that matter.

  Beneath the cloth the doll was naked, and he thought of the crude paper dresses that he had sometimes pinned together for Merenne, back when she had had dolls of her own, colored with markers he had stolen from a store. The doll was shaped like a preadolescent boy, but at the join of its legs was a mass that resembled spent bullets melted partly into each other.

  In the doll’s hand was a toy gun. (At least, he hoped it was a toy.) He eased the gun out of the doll’s grip. “A credible Zehnjer 52-3,” he said without thinking, “other than the fact that they did the cartridge upside-down.”

  He became aware that Merenne was staring at him. “You’d think,” she said, “I had all this time to get used to the idea of you as a soldier.”

  Well, it was better than the other things she could be calling him. “You didn’t call me here to identify this toy,” he said.

  “No,” Merenne said quietly. “I called you here because the children have been disappearing. I woke in the night and they were gone. The dolls were left as you see them.”

  “Kidnappers?” Ruharn said dubiously. Poor people’s children were terrible currency if you weren’t a Gardener. He knew how noisy they got, adorable as they could be. To say nothing of the messes, and the fact that you wouldn’t get any decent ransom for them.

  Her mouth half-lifted in a ghost of the smile he remembered, as though she knew what he was thinking. Then the smile died. “Ru,” she said, “I asked around. No one’s seen a Gardener since the children started to vanish.”

  He said, because he needed to know, “Has payment been left for anyone?” Because it wasn’t inconceivable, even in the midst of the crisis, that the councilors would upgrade their system of harvest. So to speak.

  Everyone knew how much you could expect for a whole child in the desirable age range, in reasonable health. Even now Ruharn knew. The payment had changed over the years, but it was impossible not to remain aware.

  For years he had taken the system for granted, the way everyone had. Part of the bargain, horrible as it was, was that the families who sold their children received something in return. Admittedly the dolls weren’t nothing, but he doubted that you could sell them for the equivalent sums. Even if it wouldn’t surprise him if someone had started collecting the ghoulish things; there were always such people in the world.

  “As if people would tell me?” Merenne said. “But no. I haven’t heard so much as a rumor. And I looked for payment”—she said this without shame—“but I saw nothing, because it was one of the first things I thought of. Maybe it’s a stupid thing t
o care about, when our world might not survive. But I have to know what happened to them. And you’re the only person I could think to ask.”

  “I know where to start,” Ruharn said carefully. “I can’t guarantee any results, though. Most especially, I doubt I can bring the children back.” Understatement, since he did think the councilors were involved, the way they were involved with everything of note. He had few illusions about his ability to influence any of them, least of all the one who had taken him for a lover.

  “I didn’t expect that,” she said. “Just find out what you can. So that we know what to expect.” Her mouth trembled for a moment, so briefly that he almost thought he had imagined it.

  Ruharn wondered what to say next. Everything seemed inadequate. At last he said, “Sometime after this is over, if I ever see you again, tell me their names.” He didn’t mention death-offerings. The deaths of children, especially small children, were so unremarkable that few people bothered.

  Merenne eyed him thoughtfully. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  He smiled. He had always liked her honesty. After all, it wasn’t as if she owed him anything. “All right,” he said. “Let me take one of the dolls.”

  “Take both,” Merenne said, with commendable steadiness. “It’s not as if they do me any good.”

  He gathered them up under one arm. Considered resting his free hand on her shoulder, then decided that he had better not. This time he did bow, although he spun on his heel before he could see the expression that crossed her face, and walked out of the house. She didn’t follow him or call out a farewell.

  The Falcon Councilor did not greet Ruharn when he returned to the underground fastness. One of the servants did, however, present him a note upon paper-of-petals. It instructed him to attend her that night.

  First he took the precaution of wrapping up the dolls and putting them in a case that he bullied out of Supply. The supply officer looked at him oddly, but he gave no explanation. It wasn’t as if he owed one.