Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  Before this day you knew the philosopher-king owned the Jewel of Mirrors, or at least, you knew that everyone said he did. You hadn’t expected the story to be put to the test. And for that matter, how is a necklace or a starship unlocked or a painting supposed to address the problem of the lanterns?

  Although you could ask the queen, it’s unlikely that she would answer. It’s more likely that you will find out when everyone else does.

  * * *

  Logistics becomes easy when everything from tinned dehydrated meals to space suits collapses into darkness, and can be reconstituted as neatly as an ancient theorem. For this mission the queen has assigned you the greatest of her warships, the starscourge Stormrose. All the queen’s ships are named after flowers.

  For most of her wars the queen accedes to her soldiers’ sensibilities and sends them out by foot, or sometimes in chariots drawn by horse or swan or slow-blinking lizard. This way they can breathe, in the way of shadow moving through an atmosphere of light. And this way they need not endure the starships’ claustrophobic nightcage.

  The Stormrose, concocted of feral triangles and claw-projections, overgrown with guns, gives no hint as to its contents. No holes have been cut into it for people to look out of. It’s a single connected silhouette, representing massacre in the semiotics of inkblots.

  The queen has come to the starport to see you off. There is a black arc above you both, and cut into it are diamonds, stars, ringed planets, the occasional prismatic flicker of meteorites flashing by. The tiger at the queen’s side sits back on its haunches and regards one of the diamonds as though it were prey for winter nights.

  “My liege,” you say as you bow before the queen.

  Her smile, you imagine, is every bit as sardonic as the one that you hide inside your heart. “I know that I cannot command you as I do the others,” she says, “no matter how disagreeable you find my presence. Nevertheless, good service is good service, and should be recognized as such. I expect nothing less of you now.”

  The queen taps your shoulder with the scepter. Long practice: you don’t shudder as your shape is joined to hers, shadows merging for a moment. You don’t need the reminder, but the ritual has to be observed, even if you are the one person who has nothing to fear from the scepter. “Go,” she says. “Bring the jewel back to me.”

  It won’t be the only thing you bring. Neither of you needs to say it, though.

  * * *

  A law of etiquette in the world of puppets: You may gesture, you may intimate, but you do not touch. You do not intersect shadow upon shadow, especially when the shadow is a person. Even lovers exchange their caresses through some intermediary: handkerchiefs of filigree lace, tangram poetry, perfectly useless masks. To touch is to become conjoined. It is not something you do where you can be seen, and everything on the world-tapestry can be seen.

  The queen with her scepter is one exception. Not only does she touch people with it, she also commands them. It is not entirely accurate to call it a scepter. Rather, it is a rod of puppet-strings, condensed to hungry facets. You have never seen your string, but you can feel it like a flickering ember even when you are far from the queen’s presence. Doubtless her other subjects experience something similar.

  The other exception is travel in conveyances: carriages that admit no windows, submarines scarred by battles with gnashing kraken, starships like the one that you will command against the philosopher-king. Leisurely journeys, foregoing such vehicles, are fashionable for a reason.

  Another law of etiquette in the world of puppets: you do not speak of the ligatures fraying, of the paper shedding its fibers and the limbs worn thin, of the scalloped edges after encounters with water. (After fire, water is the element that puppets fear most. Glue is not well-regarded, either.) You do not speak of the fact that the queen’s favorite tiger smells incongruously of tangerines and cloves and amber after a mishap with a perfume bottle, or the stiffness of the queen’s hands, which she makes no attempt to disguise, and which no one is foolish enough to remark on. Everything is smoothed over by shadow.

  This is probably the only reason nobody asks how it is that you are char-marked, fire-scarred, and whole of form; how you survived.

  * * *

  We are the Stormrose. Within this warship’s boundary crenellations, we are one weapon and one will. A single burnt knight stands apart; but the knight’s mission is ours, and in any case it is not for us to question the queen’s dictate.

  In times unwritten, we have punched holes like arpeggiated quavers into crowds that flee, but never fast enough. We have called down fire as sudden as cardiac failure upon citadels new-crowded with ghosts. We have cultivated flowers whose radiations exhale calligraphy-splashes onto the threadbare cloth.

  In times unwritten, there were no graves and no pyres, no corpses and no epitaphs, only bland expanses of background fabric where shadows once moved. Our orders this time are different. So the queen said. So the knight says now.

  The ship breathes with one breath, strikes with one hand. At some later time we may disembark and become individuals again. We will not concern ourselves with this until it becomes necessary.

  We do not know what the knight thinks of this, except that this is a familiar story to it, possibly unworthy of special attention. We do not ask.

  It’s not a coincidence that the knight has a gun the way the queen has a scepter.

  * * *

  On the last day that his capital stands, the philosopher-king sets free his flocks of origami birds, crane and goose and extravagant peacock. He sends all his servants home, and persuades the courtiers and guards and alchemists to follow them. The guards, like the soldiers, may keep their weapons, but he makes it plain, without words, that those weapons are unlikely to bring them any profit. The great towers of the palace fold in upon themselves so that the band of sky with its cloudscatter and raindrift can be seen without obstruction. The Stormrose, too, can be seen as it eclipses the cut-out sun in its descent.

  Then the philosopher-king sits in his study and writes. He writes upon a shadow-book with shadow-pages, incising words of light like the bite marks of didactic snakes. For years he has been adding oddments of lore, fragments of story: everything he has heard about the Jewel of Mirrors, including a few divertissements of his own.

  On this last day, your soldiers march through the streets with their thorn-swords and bramble-nets to collect the philosopher-king’s former subjects for removal. In the meantime, you walk unimpeded through the mazy passages of his palace and come upon him, still sitting, still writing. You wait patiently while he finishes the page that he is working on.

  “I had expected you to fight,” you say. The queen had said he would. Instead, he has done anything but.

  The philosopher-king laughs softly. “I am unlike your queen in most matters,” he says, “but like her, I know the name of your gun. If I saw some escape for my people, I would have taken it. But I have read the signs in the sky, the world-tapestry’s inexorable dimming. It’s one death or another, however you figure it.”

  He closes the book and holds it out to you. You eye it askance. “This is the Jewel of Mirrors,” he says. “A collection of fables. I imagine your queen will find it entertaining bedtime reading for the sleep she never indulges in. Go on, you may as well ask the obvious question.”

  “If you wish,” you say. No harm in accommodating a man whose realm you have so thoroughly ruined, especially when you can sieve him dead at any moment. In the distance you hear silence baked upon silence as your soldiers staple their captives’ mouths shut. The queen despises screaming and lamentations. “Where do the fables come from?”

  “The same place any riddle comes from,” the philosopher-king says. “I have spent a lifetime collecting them. Not enough of a lifetime finding answers. It appears my turn is done and your queen may have much joy of this endeavor. Call it a final gift.”

  “You don’t expect to be spared,” you say, because you have to be sure.

>   “Of course not.”

  “Why bother?” you ask. “If she appreciates the gift, it will be to lock it up in a cage of shelves, to be admired but not perused.” She has received you in her library before. Sometimes she studies the intricate spiraling designs stamped across the books’ covers, but it is rare that you catch her reading.

  The philosopher-king shrugs. “Oh, I’m not concerned with her. I am, however, pleased to have this small opportunity to talk to you.”

  His calm makes you wary. This entire conversation could be a trap. Still, surely he realizes that the queen has other knights, and that her soldiers will carry out their orders whether or not you’re there to supervise them? “One captive more or less will make no difference to the queen,” you say. Indeed, she made it explicit that she has no particular need for the philosopher-king’s carcass. “You cannot hope to dissuade me. I have no heart to appeal to.” One more thing the queen made certain of.

  He stirs slightly at that, as if he had begun to smile. “In that you are mistaken,” he says. “I have no doubt that your queen knows the truth, even if she has misled you. A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do.”

  Not just the palace but the capital entire is cloaked in strata of silence. The only sounds now are the words that pass between you and the doomed king. You listen for heartbeat drums and hear nothing. Even your soldiers are escorting the captives back to the Stormrose without sound.

  “Take the book,” the philosopher-king says. “As a souvenir if nothing else.” And then he tells you something unexpected: “Try not to think too harshly of your queen. She is something of an expert on difficult choices.”

  You accept the gift, tucking it into folds of shadow. The snakebite words pass into you; you ignore the scour of stories freeze-dried. “It’s your turn now,” you say, and raise your gun.

  * * *

  The queen’s people know your gun as Candor. The queen’s idea of a joke, a gift to someone who rarely has the opportunity to speak freely.

  You and the queen know the gun’s true name. It is called Combustion.

  As a point of fact, the gun’s incomparable lethality is only tangentially related to the vulnerabilities of paper or cloth.

  * * *

  The Stormrose bears you and the soldiers and the prisoners back to the queen’s starport. You are the first to disembark. The queen awaits you with her customary tiger. “What have you brought for me?” she asks. “The smoke-skeleton of a bird? A scintillant circuit? A mirror of undesired insights?”

  “A book,” you say as you salute her, attempting to not express your doubts about the whole endeavor. You produce it for her inspection.

  The queen laughs and returns your salute with a mocking wave. “Of course. He always did believe that everyone could be educated. It isn’t the worst fallacy I’ve ever encountered.” She takes the book from you and sets it before the tiger. The tiger bats at it experimentally. Probably just as dubious as you are.

  “The disposition of the prisoners?” you ask. What was the point of ferrying them all back here, anyway? The queen has occasionally taken interest in gladiatorial amusements, but she is unlikely to be frivolous at a time like this.

  “In your absence I have prepared a dungeon,” the queen says. She gestures, and you see it in the distance: an obtrusion you had mistaken for some recent fantasia of topiary. “The prisoners can reside there for the moment.”

  You give the necessary orders, and the soldiers and their freight of unspeaking captives begin to march toward the dungeon. “I don’t understand what use you have for these people,” you say.

  She doesn’t smile. “Book, jewel, bird, it’s immaterial,” she says. “The people were the point of this exercise in numbers.”

  You should have figured it out earlier. She was never interested in refueling the lanterns through some treasure contrived of riddles, although in a land where starships coexist with chimeras, it wasn’t impossible that such a treasure would perform as specified. No: she means to use the captives as fuel.

  “You have never approved of me,” the queen says dryly, “but then, I have never required your approval. It has only been enough that what I do is for the preservation of the realm; any ruler’s duty.”

  “You’re going to run out of prisoners,” you say. “The supply of foreigners is finite. And after that, what then—your own people? Incompetent chefs? Birds that sing too early in the morning? Overly demanding consorts?”

  “I almost wish you’d lose your temper more often,” she muses. “You’re not incapable of wit.” Her regard narrows. “But the world is dimming, and I have need of you yet.”

  * * *

  The world beyond has lanterns, which are called stars. Nuclei strike each other, overcome the forces that would repel them from each other, and form new nuclei. Just as shadows can be crushed together, so can particles, and in the process they dance a fury of light. Yet no star burns forever, and no universe warms its inhabitants forever, either.

  This process, while it lasts, is known as fusion. A form of combustion, if you like.

  * * *

  You don’t like the queen, yet she has this virtue: she has always looked out for the best interests of her realm. If the rest of the world has to burn for her people’s welfare, so be it. It is this knifing purity of purpose that has kept you by her side all this time.

  “A lesson for you, if you will,” the queen says. She sounds quietly exhausted, and that faint vulnerability alarms you. You do not wish to see weakness in her. It implies weakness in yourself, to the extent that you are her instrument. “There is no convenient isomorphism between the physics of the world beyond and the laws by which we live here. People are shadows, and shadows are souls. Unlike nuclei, they will burn forever: the perfect fuel. Even so, I sought to spare people—not just our people, but our enemies as well—as long as possible.

  “Look up—not toward the cut-out shapes of star and crescent, but up out of the plane of the world-tapestry, up along the perpendicular. All the stars out there have burned out. Everything is cooling. We have denuded a universe of lanterns for our own survival. The only ones left to us are those we nourish ourselves.”

  You are learning to ask questions too late. You look up, then back at the queen. “There weren’t just lanterns in that universe,” you say.

  * * *

  Civilizations come to terms with the heat death of the universe in various ways, if they do at all. A small selection of possibilities:

  Some of them attempt to rewrite the laws of entropy, as though statistical mechanics were amenable to postmodern narrative techniques.

  Some of them research ways to punch through into other universes, anthropic principle notwithstanding. It is rarely the case that other universes are more hospitable than the current one.

  Some of them build monuments of the rarest materials that they can devise, even knowing that everything will be pulverized to the same singularity punctuation. Not all of the art thus created is particularly worthy of the effort put into it, but neither will there be anyone left to judge.

  And some of them simply commit mass suicide, on the grounds that they would prefer to choose the manner of their passing. At this end of time, weapons of incandescent destruction are commonplace. We may assume that a sufficiently determined civilization can contrive to obtain some.

  Each of these trajectories ends in darkness.

  * * *

  “You want the captives to burn forever,” you say. “Then, as a corollary, the people you put into those lanterns will never escape through death.”

  “You’re learning about consequences,” the queen says. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  You know why the queen chose you for this task, and not some other, although it’s not inconceivable that there are backups. She cut you from the paper of a lantern, sacrificing its light forever. You remember being raked by fire, and the shearing scissors. You remember being constructed without a heart.

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nbsp; Knight of Pyres. Combustion. She needs you to light the lanterns for her.

  A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do, the philosopher-king had said. You wonder what would have happened if someone had said it to you a lifetime ago. It’s unlikely that you would have listened. Only now, as you behold a universe comprehensively dissipated, do you realize what service you have rendered all this time.

  “I can’t do this for you,” you say.

  “So you are no longer content to be a knight,” the queen says, unnervingly composed. The queen’s hands. “I advise you to consider your decision carefully. Once you start making choices of your own, you move into the realm of consequence, and in most matters you cannot erase mistakes, or responsibility. Are you certain this is what you want? Our world slowly waning to a forever black?” Her mouth curves as you hesitate.

  You raise your gun.

  She raises the scepter.

  You’re faster. And you don’t shoot her, anyway. You shoot the scepter. It goes up in a hellscream of fire and smoke and uncoiled volition.

  The queen doesn’t let go, and the fire spreads to her hand. “In the darkness you will be outnumbered,” she says, raising her voice over the crackling. “People will attempt to relight the lanterns themselves. They will seek weapons deadlier than Combustion. They will come to you and beg in words like broken wings for any pittance of light. You will have to stand vigil alone in the forever night, listening, in case someone in the mass of shadow is clever enough to undo what you have done and start the furnace of souls.”

  “Drop the scepter,” you cry. The gun is specific in its effect. This is an airless world and all fire is, in a sense, artificially sustained. She could survive a little while yet, one-armed.

  “The realm of consequence,” she says remindingly.

  Time does not pass here as it does in the world beyond, but it passes quickly enough when it cares to. The queen burns up like a candle, like a torch, like a star of guttering ambitions.