Fearsome Magics

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Why did you do it?” he asked her. “Didn’t you love me? I thought you loved me. Didn’t I love you, wasn’t it enough?” He held her and he cried.

  She tried to move her mouth. The face splintered with the effort. Hairline fractures ran from her lips down her body. Water began to leak from the cracks. He felt her start to break open. He saw how much pain even attempting to talk caused her.

  “No,” he said. “No. Don’t speak. I don’t need to know.”

  He kissed her on that shattered mouth then, and her lips seemed to press hard against his in turn. And the cold ran down his throat, as refreshing as an iced drink on a hot summer’s day.

  “I’ll never love anyone the way I’ve loved you,” he told her, and even as he said it he wasn’t sure it was true. So he held her tight, he wrapped himself around her, one arm over, one arm under.

  It took her several hours to melt away. He stayed with her right to the end.

  9

  AND THEN HE woke up—or fell asleep, he could no longer tell the difference. And in that dream, or waking state, he was in a lot of pain, and it took him a while to realise, and at last he went to the hospital.

  And later that night, when he fell asleep—or woke up, whichever—he went to some place entirely new.

  His blistered hands mended, in time they even got some feeling back.

  10

  AND THINGS GOT better after that. Things got worse before they got better, as things have a way of doing. But, in the end, things improved.

  But there was one night that was terrible, and Simon was overcome with such a tremendous sense of pointlessness that it seemed like a weight pressing down upon his chest. He could feel it, his chest hurting with it, he could feel his heart thumping away just below the surface. He went to the bedroom window. He opened it. It was a cold night, the blast of chill seemed welcoming somehow, he’d forgotten how comforting the cold could be. He would crawl out of the window. That would take care of it. He could crawl out of the window, and he could let himself fall, he could go headfirst if he really wanted to be sure. And he didn’t do it. And it wasn’t because he was stayed by any powerful force—no hand of God from on high, no wolves, Cathy didn’t come back and urge him to live. No one was there to help—just as, he supposed, at the moment she’d needed it, no one had helped Cathy. But he understood suddenly that to kill himself would be the work of a moment, how quick it would be, a single decision taken in an instant. And that no one should be defined by a moment, not even a terminal one. Simon had his moment then, just as Cathy had had hers—they chose differently, that was the only thing between them, and it was all right, it was really all all right. He stayed by the window for a long while, enjoying the cold, enjoying the possibility that the cold might still be the last thing he’d feel. And at last he yawned, and got back into bed, and went to sleep, and he never seriously considered taking his life ever again.

  He still went to visit Arthur and Sarah on Sundays. But not every week, maybe one week in three. He didn’t take them flowers. He sometimes took wine.

  One Sunday Arthur sat him down before the lamb roast and told him he had some news. Arthur had cancer, and he wasn’t going to fight it. It was okay. He accepted it. “ I’m not prepared to struggle,” he said. He told Sarah and Simon that he loved them both, and that his only sadness was leaving them behind, and Sarah cried a little, and Simon mostly just felt proud he’d been included.

  Again, Simon sat with Sarah during the funeral. She squeezed his hand during all the difficult bits.

  She said to him afterwards, “I like to think that Arthur is with Cathy now. Is that silly?”

  “No,” said Simon. “It isn’t silly.”

  “But what if they’ve gone to different places? I don’t know. I can’t help but think. Arthur died naturally, but Cathy...”

  “I have no idea where Cathy is now,” said Simon. “But I can promise you, she isn’t in Hell.”

  Sarah kissed him. Simon asked whether she would like him to come and see her next Sunday, and Sarah said she didn’t think she would. Not now, not any more. But she smiled and she kissed him again. And then they went their separate ways.

  He only went back to the ice the once. And it was years later, and only for a little while. He didn’t think he was even fully asleep, he was just dozing.

  Simon hadn’t even thought about the ice for such a long time. He’d met Debbie, and things were good with Debbie. She didn’t do any of the Cathy things he had once loved, but that was fine, because in retrospect Cathy hadn’t been good at any of the Debbie things either. Debbie laughed a lot more than Cathy did, and she made the cutest face when she was tired, and when she got excited her feet wouldn’t stop tapping.

  Debbie wasn’t there that night. She’d gone to visit her mother. And Simon quite enjoyed having all the bed to himself again, but missed Debbie all the same, and cuddled the pillow.

  The cold of the ice was a shock, as was its brightness. But it wasn’t unpleasant. Simon breathed in the air, and he liked the way it felt so fresh, and he liked the puff of steam he was able to blow out.

  Ice as far as he could see, but wasn’t that something? That the ice was never ending, that it just went on forever, that nothing got in its way. You had to admire something that just refused to give up.

  He threw off the sheets. Yes, it was cold, but he’d get used to it. You could get used to anything, given time and patience. The moon was close above him. He stood on the mattress. He wobbled a bit on the bedsprings, but he steadied. On his tiptoes, he stretched his arms as high as they could reach. And he touched the moon. His fingers caked with soft crumbly moon dust.

  He knew he was saying goodbye to the ice world. And he was all right with that. Because to get to say goodbye at all, that is a privilege.

  He couldn’t see anything on the horizon, there were no black specks dancing about in the far distance. But he heard the howling, from so far away, the sound carried across the silence. Simon smiled, he threw back his head. He took a deep breath. And he howled too, as loud as he could, and hoped the wolves could hear him.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Tony Ballantyne (www.tonyballantyne.com) is the author of the Penrose and Recursion series of novels as well as many acclaimed short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies around the world. He has been nominated for the BSFA and Philip K Dick awards. The idea for ‘Dream London Hospital’ sprang from his latest novel, Dream London, which was described by the Financial Times “...as strange and unclassifiable a novel as it’s possible to imagine, and a marvellous achievement.” He is currently working on the follow up, Dream Paris, due to be published in September 2015.

  James Bradley (cityoftongues.com) is a novelist and critic. His books include three novels, Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist, anthology The Penguin Book of the Ocean and most recently the novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’. His fiction has been shortlisted for or won a wide range of literary awards, including the Miles Franklin Award, the Christina Stead Award for Fiction, The Age Book of the Year and the Aurealis Awards for Best Novel and Best Science Fiction Short Story. In 2012 he won the Pascall Award for Australia’s Critic of the Year. His new novel, Clade, will be published in 2014. He lives in Sydney, Australia and blogs at cityoftongues.com.

  Isobelle Carmody (www.isobellecarmody.net) is the award winning author of over thirty books and many short stories. She has just returned from living more than a decade in Europe to do her PhD at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. ‘Grigori’s Solution’ is the first of a collection of stories she is working on, called The Beach at the End of the World.

  Frances Hardinge (www.franceshardinge.com) was brought up in a sequence of small, sinister English villages, and spent a number of formative years living in a Gothic-looking, mouse-infested hilltop house in Kent. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford, fell in love with the city’s crazed archaic beauty, and lived there for many years. Whilst working full time as a techni
cal author for a software company she started writing her first children’s novel, Fly by Night, and was, with difficulty, persuaded by a good friend to submit the manuscript to a publisher. Fly by Night went on to win the Branford Boase Award, and was also shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. Her subsequent books, Verdigris Deep, Gullstruck Island, Twilight Robbery, A Face Like Glass and Cuckoo’s Song are also aimed at children and young adults. Frances is seldom seen without her hat and is addicted to volcanoes.

  Over the past thirty years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman (ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html) has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her fiction has won her a Stoker and a Nebula Award. A collection of short stories, Permeable Borders, was published in 2012 by Fairwood Press and a new young adult novel is due from Viking in 2015. Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches writing through Lane Community College and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

  Ellen Klages (www.ellenklages.com) is the author of two acclaimed YA novels: The Green Glass Sea, which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Lopez Award; and White Sands, Red Menace, which won the California and New Mexico Book Awards. Her short stories, which have been collected in World Fantasy Award nominated collection Portable Childhoods, have been have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swedish and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, and Campbell awards. Her story, ‘Basement Magic,’ won a Nebula in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things.

  Garth Nix (www.garthnix.com) grew up in Canberra, Australia. When he turned nineteen, he left to drive around the United Kingdom in a beat-up Austin with a boot full of books and a Silver-Reed typewriter. Despite a wheel literally falling off the car, he survived to return to Australia and study at the University of Canberra. He has since worked in a bookshop, as a book publicist, a publisher’s sales representative, an editor, as a literary agent, and as a public relations and marketing consultant. His first story was published in 1984 and was followed by novels The Ragwitch, Sabriel, Shade’s Children, Lirael, Abhorsen, the six-book YA fantasy series “The Seventh Tower,” the seven-book “The Keys to the Kingdom” series, A Confusion of Princes and, most recently, the Troubletwisters series (co-written with Sean Williams). A new novel set in the Old Kingdom, Clariel, is due out in 2014. He lives in Sydney with his wife and their two children.

  K J Parker (www.kjparker.net), who lives quietly in exile in the south-west of England, has written three trilogies, four standalone novels, four novellas (two of which won the World Fantasy Award, a fact of which Parker is shamefully, embarrassingly proud) and a small hatful of short stories; all of which (as they say on Broadway) everybody loved except the public. When not writing, Parker does strenuous things in the woods. K J Parker is a pseudonym designed to conceal the true identity of someone nobody’s ever heard of.

  Justina Robson (justinarobson.blogspot.com) was born in Yorkshire, England in 1968. After completing school she dropped out of Art College, then studied Philosophy and Linguistics at York University. She sold her first novel, Silver Screen, in 1999. Since then she has won the 2000 Amazon.co.uk Writers’ Bursary Award. She has also been a student (1992) and a teacher (2002, 2006) at The Arvon Foundation, in the UK, a centre for the development and promotion of all kinds of creative writing. She was a student at Clarion West, the US bootcamp for SF and Fantasy writers, in 1996. Her books have been variously shortlisted for The British Science Fiction Best Novel Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Philip K Dick Award and the John W Campbell Award. A collection of her short fiction, Heliotrope, was published in 2012. In 2004 Justina was a judge for the Arthur C Clarke Award (best SF novel of the year published in the English language), on behalf of The Science Fiction Foundation. Her novels and stories range widely over SF and Fantasy.

  Christopher Rowe (www.christopherrowe.typepad.com) has published more than twenty short stories, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Frequently reprinted, his work has been translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and has been praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story ‘Another Word For Map is Faith’ made the long list in the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, by Small Beer Press. His Forgotten Realms novel, Sandstorm, was published in 2010 by Wizards of the Coast. He is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University and is hard at work on Sarah Across America, a new novel about maps, megafauna, and other obsessions. He lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond, and their pets.

  Robert Shearman (www.robertshearman.net) is probably best known for bringing back the Daleks in a Hugo Award nominated episode of the first series of the BBC’s revival of Doctor Who. But in Britain he has had a long career writing for both theatre and radio, winning two Sony awards, the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, and the Guinness Award for Theatre Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, won the World Fantasy Award; its follow-up, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, received the British Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards, while third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, spawned his craziest idea yet. His most recent book is collection Remember Why You Fear Me. Coming up is a new collection They Do the Same Things Different Here.

  Born in 1977 in Stockholm, Sweden, Karin Tidbeck (www.karintidbeck.com) lives in Malmö where she works as a project leader and freelance creative writing instructor. She has previously worked as a writer for role-playing productions in schools and theatres, and written articles and essays on gaming and interactive arts theory. She’s an alumna of the 2010 Clarion San Diego writers’ workshop. She has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002, including a short story collection, Vem är Arvid Pekon?, and the recent novel Amatka. Her English publication history includes noted short story collection Jagganath and stories in Weird Tales, Shimmer Magazine, Unstuck Annual and the anthologies Odd? and Steampunk Revolution.

  Genevieve Valentine’s (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Apex, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, After, and more. Her story ‘Light on the Water’ was a 2009 World Fantasy Award nominee, and ‘Things to Know about Being Dead’ was a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award nominee; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). Coming up is new young adult novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.

  Bram Stoker Nominee and Shirley Jackson Award winner Kaaron Warren (kaaronwarren.wordpress.com) has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification) and four short story collections. Through Splintered Walls won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction, two Ditmar Awards, two Australian Shadows Awards and a Shirley Jackson Award. Her story ‘Air, Water and the Grove’ won the Aurealis Award for Best SF Short Story and will appear in Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. Her latest collection is The Gate Theory.

  ALSO FROM

  SOLARIS

  How do you encompass all the worlds of the imagination? Within fantasy’s scope lies every possible impossibility, from dragons to spirits, from magic to gods, and from the unliving to the undying.

  In Fearsome Journeys,
master anthologist Jonathan Strahan sets out on a quest to find the very limits of the unlimited, collecting twelve brand new stories by some of the most popular and exciting names in epic fantasy from around the world.

  With original fiction from Scott Lynch, Saladin Ahmed, Trudi Canavan, K J Parker, Kate Elliott, Jeffrey Ford, Robert V S Redick, Ellen Klages, Glen Cook, Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, Ysabeau S. Wilce and Daniel Abraham, Fearsome Journeys explores the whole range of the fantastic.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  Google Play is a trademark of Google Inc.

  HUMANITY AMONG THE STARS

  What happens when we reach out into the vastness of space? What hope for us amongst the stars?

  Multi-award winning editor Jonathan Strahan brings us fourteen new tales of the future, from some of the finest science fiction writers in the field.

  The fourteen startling stories in this anthology feature the work of Greg Egan, Aliette de Bodard, Ian McDonald, Karl Schroeder, Pat Cadigan, Karen Lord, Ellen Klages, Adam Roberts, Linda Nagata, Hannu Rajaniemi, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds and Peter Watts.